Final Cut (11 page)

To keep control of the business, Brogan needed munitions. With the Russians moving in, the knife was no longer the weapon of choice. Brogan had set up a nice little business to supply his troops courtesy of Her Majesty’s forces. A couple of disgruntled soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Scotland, pissed off at being shafted by the government, had decided to stash away a nest egg for their retirement, if they reached it alive. In the mess that was the current supply chain in the British Army, it was easy to remove some weapons from use and send them north of the border.

He poured another shot of vodka. Solonik’s massive bulk shifted almost imperceptibly. Was it a warning gesture to indicate he was watching Brogan’s alcohol consumption? Brogan swallowed the shot and rose from his seat, indicating he was going for a piss. Solonik lumbered out of his way.

Brogan closed the cubicle door behind him. This was the only place he could escape Solonik’s beady eye. Christ, even when he was fucking, the man mountain stood outside the door.

‘For your protection,’ Prokhorov had told him. ‘People want me dead. You work with me, so they want you dead too.’

Brogan didn’t buy that. Solonik wasn’t his bodyguard, he was his minder, making sure he didn’t get too big for his Glasgow boots.

His piss hit the pan in a cloud of steam. He imagined it hitting the big Russian’s face after he’d stuck a knife through his kidneys.

Solonik was in trouble. He just didn’t know it yet. Brogan pulled the tabloid newspaper cutting from his inside pocket. AWOL soldier burned to death in skip. The tabloids always got things wrong.

With the inside information he had, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Someone had found the body at the dump and used it to try to cover their own disappearance. Clever, but not foolproof. Still, if it worked it meant Solonik was off the hook for the killing and Brogan didn’t want that. He wanted that hook right in the bastard’s gullet. He wanted Solonik reined in and disposed of, off his back for good.

He just hadn’t decided how to go about it – yet.

19

Rhona glanced at the clock. McNab had left the lab two hours ago. She swivelled her head, trying to relieve the tension in the back of her neck. If Sean had been here, he would have massaged her shoulders to help her relax. But he wasn’t here. Rhona tested her reaction to that, much as she had been doing for months, and decided she liked being on her own – most of the time.

The routine of sieving soil could be therapeutic. A bit like gardening, she thought. Her father had been a keen gardener. As a child she’d taken the well-tended garden for granted, assuming its beauty would be there for ever. But nothing lasted for ever. Her father’s garden in Skye was grassed over now, a victim of her neglect.

She lifted another bag of soil, noting the details on the label which indicated the grid location and depth of the sample. She emptied the material into the sieve and began to agitate it. She had returned to this job on McNab’s departure. The discovery of human remains was a cold case that could last for months or even years. The skip fire should take precedence, yet talking to McNab and then to Emma’s mother had served to make this case feel more immediate.

The initial sieving of soil normally identified larger items, but in this case there had been none in the top level. No bottle tops, ring-pulls or the other debris you found in more urban settings. Worm action often resulted in the redistribution of items in the soil, so the depth of an object didn’t necessarily indicate when an item had been deposited.

The finer soil had percolated through. Rhona examined the remnants that lay on the fine mesh, spreading it out with her latex-covered finger. There was a fragment of glass, so small as to be almost invisible. She extracted it and took it over to a high-powered microscope.

Under magnification she could make out the orange-red colour and the splinter-like shape. As trace evidence went, glass could be useful. Perpetrators of crimes, particularly burglary, didn’t realise that they carried microscopic particles of the glass they’d shattered on their clothes and in their hair.

An analysis of the chemical content and refractive index of the glass could give an indication of what it had been used for. Coloured glass tended to be more identifiable than ordinary glass owing to the mineral content that produced its colour. Glass manufacturers each had their own glass recipe, just as paint manufacturers created their own unique paint.

Rhona’s stomach was reminding her just how long it had been since she’d eaten the borscht. She decided to finally call it a day and go home. The prospect of another microwave ready-made meal didn’t appeal, so she bought a pizza on the way.

Tom met her at the door, winding himself round her legs, nearly upending her and the precious cardboard box. She quickly fed him, feeling guilty at how long she’d kept him waiting. She would have to buy one of those bowls with a timer, set to release food at regular intervals.

Rhona walked through the flat, putting on lights and turning up the heating. This was the moment in her day when living alone didn’t appeal as much. She allowed herself to remember how it had been when Sean was here – the scent of cooking when she’d opened the front door, the sound of a human voice calling out to her – then recalled how often she’d welcomed the realisation that Sean had left for work and the flat was empty.

‘There’s no pleasing you,’ she muttered to herself. She shoved the pizza in the oven to keep it warm while she showered and changed.

Eating alone at the kitchen table had become something she’d avoided since Sean had left. These days she preferred to eat in the sitting room with the TV for company.

She fetched her notes for next day’s court appearance and read them while she ate. It seemed an open-and-shut case. Mary had heard a noise in her hall and gone to investigate. Her attacker, a young man high on drugs and alcohol, had beaten her to death. His defence was that he had stumbled into the wrong flat and in the darkened hall had been attacked by the flat’s occupant. He’d hit her only in self-defence. Not a bad attempt at getting off with murder. He wasn’t denying that he’d entered the flat. He was just denying that he’d attacked Mary on purpose. The problem lay in his assertion that the hall had been in darkness throughout, preventing him from realising how badly hurt the occupant was.

When the first SOCO arrived, they’d filled in the usual checklist, which included the question
Was the light on or off?
The light had been on, which meant the accused was lying. Along with the details of the forensic report on the body, this meant Mary’s killer would be going away – hopefully for a very long time.

Rhona set the notes on one side and laid her head back on the sofa, overcome with tiredness. She thought about sleeping right there on the couch, knowing once in bed she would likely end up staring at the ceiling for hours before the nightmare took over. She fetched the duvet and draped it over her, then reached for the remote.

The late news had already begun. As far as she knew, Bill still had a blackout on Emma Watson’s role in the discovery of the skull, so she was surprised to hear the newsreader reveal that it had been discovered after a car had gone off the road in the recent storm. A description then followed of a man believed to have been in the vicinity at the time, who the police urged to come forward. There was still no direct mention of Emma or Claire. It looked as though Bill was taking Claire’s story about a man on the road seriously, unless something else had come to light that Rhona didn’t know about.

She lowered the sound on the television to a background murmur and nestled down, leaving the table lamp on. Tom had come to join her, and the steady rhythm of his purring began to lull her towards sleep.

She was wakened by the alarm. Her initial reaction was confusion as she heard the murmur of early morning television. Then she was absurdly grateful that she had slept through the night, something that hadn’t happened for some time. She rose, her limbs stiff from the confinement of the couch.

Claire Watson phoned while she was eating breakfast.

‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to see Emma today. My mother died last Sunday and I have to go to the nursing home and finalise arrangements for her funeral tomorrow.’

McNab had never mentioned that the child’s granny had just died, in fact had died the night of the crash. Rhona wondered whether he knew.

‘What if we meet with you after the funeral?’ Rhona suggested. ‘I could check out the wood with Emma on her way home.’

The silence that followed was long enough to convince her that Claire had changed her mind about allowing the excursion at all.

Finally she answered. ‘If Emma is distressed . . .’

‘Then of course we won’t go.’

Claire, sounding mollified, gave Rhona a time and a place.

‘We’ll be there,’ Rhona promised.

The old and the new High Courts of Glasgow sat side by side at the foot of the Saltmarket, both pillared entrances, the new version reflecting the grandeur of the old.

Behind the court Shipbank Lane housed Paddy’s Market, Glasgow’s legendary flea market. Started by Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, it still sold second-hand clothing to the poor of Glasgow. Recent reports suggested the end of the two-hundred-year-old market was nigh, as the City Council had announced plans to lease the site and turn it into a showcase for aspiring artists. Rhona felt a stab of sadness about this. The gentrification of the city was intent on wiping out its past.

McNab was waiting for her in the lobby.

‘I’ve done my bit. Apparently forensic testimony is next up.’

‘Good.’

‘So we can head south after that.’

Rhona told him about her early morning conversation.

‘Shit. I had no idea the granny had died.’

‘Claire never said?’

He shook his head. ‘No wonder the kid’s screwed up. OK, so when do we go?’

‘I got her mother to agree to tomorrow after the funeral.’

The clerk emerged from the court and beckoned Rhona over.

‘Will you be here when I come out?’

‘I’ll get a coffee and wait for you.’

‘So?’ McNab said when she re-emerged.

‘I think he’s fucked.’

‘That’s what I like to hear.’

McNab had gone to Mary Healey’s funeral. Him and most of the residents of Alison Street. He was a Govanhill boy himself. ‘Brought up in Govanhill Street in a top-floor tenement,’ he told Rhona. Hence his desire to see the old woman’s killer go down.

‘Fancy a real coffee?’ McNab made a face at the polystyrene cup in his hand.

‘Definitely.’

An early morning frost had combined with freezing fog to blanket the city in white and grey. It was still an improvement on a howling wind and snow. Rhona wound her scarf tightly round her neck and stuck her gloved hands in her pockets.

‘Central Café?’

She nodded and hurried to keep up with him. When they reached the café, he pushed the door open to let her enter first. The contrast in temperature made Rhona’s cheeks burn. McNab stopped for a word with Rocco, the proprietor, while she headed for a window table.

The Central Café was one of those places you hoped would be there for ever. Some felt it already had been. McNab remembered it from his childhood, as did people twenty years older. It was one of the old-style cafés, of which there had once been many. No longer an ice-cream parlour, it was now better known for its fish and chips.

Rhona recalled a similar establishment at the top of Byres Road when she’d been a Glasgow University student. The proprietor had made the best Horlicks ever, substantial and creamy enough for a poverty-stricken student to use as a lunch substitute.

McNab arrived with a large mug of black coffee, just the way she liked it. It was at times like this she was reminded just how well he knew her.

‘I saw the bit on the late news. You’re sure there was someone on the road?’ she asked when he’d settled himself opposite.

‘I had a look at the R2S video of the crash location. If there was a man there and he was facing like Claire said, then he was staring back at the wood in the direction of the deposition site.’

‘Really?’

‘I decided that merited trying to find him, if only to eliminate him from the inquiry.’

Rhona told him about the glass fragment. ‘I’m checking out the constituents, but it looks like it might be stained glass.’

‘As in a stained-glass window?’

‘Yes.’

McNab considered this. ‘It’s not much to go on.’

He was right. On its own the glass wasn’t a lot of use, but it might be if they came up with a suspect.

‘I did a trawl of unsolved cases,’ he said. ‘There are twelve missing children during the period we’re focusing on.’ He handed Rhona a printout.

She ran her eye over the pictures.

McNab pointed to a smiling elfin girl. ‘She disappeared from St Pancras station nine years ago. She was with her big sister one minute, gone the next. Only one possible sighting of her later that day with a middle-aged man getting into a red car, no make, no registration number.’

‘I don’t think it’s her.’

McNab waited for an explanation.

‘The skull Emma found didn’t have that overlap on the front teeth.’

‘That simple?’

‘Teeth are unique and last a long time. Obviously we’ll check out the dental records of all the missing kids against the remains, but at a first glance I would say that isn’t our child.’

They sat in silence for a moment.

‘What if the dead child was never reported missing?’ she suggested.

They both knew that was a possibility. For a minor to be registered as missing, a parent or guardian would have to inform the police. Social services weren’t interested in your child unless you were on their radar. Kids joined and left schools in the urban areas with monotonous regularity, especially those with itinerant workers for parents. As for those in the care system, recent high-profile cases showed how easily they could disappear, especially ten years ago.