Final Cut (8 page)

It could not be coincidence that the remains had been discovered shortly after that woman had swerved off the road and crashed her car.

He pondered this. Through closed eyes, he relived the moment when the blue Peugeot had appeared from nowhere – the startled face at the windscreen, the mouth open in a scream.

He channelled his anger towards that face.

If she’d died in the crash, he had nothing to worry about. There was nothing else to link him to that wood.

If the bitch had survived, then the sooner he found her the better.

13

McNab sat down at his cluttered desk. The double shot of coffee he’d fetched from the machine was doing its job, but not fast enough. He surreptitiously added a nip of whisky from the half-bottle in his drawer. Everything was going arse up and he couldn’t stop it. He knew the boss was in with the super. It had to be about the assault case.

He swallowed the whisky-laced coffee quickly then got himself online. There were twenty emails waiting. He skimmed through them, hardly registering the titles, until he spotted one from Emma. It had an attachment alongside. McNab braced himself, then clicked to open. He had planned to offload the kid on the DI, but that no longer looked like a possibility. He would have to keep the contact going himself. He liked Claire. He liked the kid, even if she was a little strange, but he didn’t have the time to spend nursing either of them.

The message read:

I wanted to show you this when you were here, but Mum wouldn’t let me. This is what I dream. This is what I hear
.

McNab opened the attachment.

It was a simple drawing of a tree done with a kids’ software program, the branches bare of leaves. Under the roots, a small naked body hung suspended as though in the air. An attempt had been made to draw the genitals, making it a boy.

‘Jesus.’ McNab found himself repulsed by the image.

Below was the message
Don’t leave me here alone
.

The kid’s sick, he thought. Maybe she was sick before this happened. Claire had seemed frightened, but he’d assumed it was just the effect of the accident. He realised he should have asked more questions, but then he hadn’t been there to interview or interrogate either of them. Claire had asked him to come.

McNab’s first instinct was to ignore the email. If Claire contacted him about it, he could pretend he hadn’t checked his mailbox because of pressure of work. If in doubt, do nothing. A mantra that had served him well in the past.

What the kid was suggesting was nonsense anyway. As far as the investigation was concerned, they had one set of remains. They’d searched the area surrounding the deposition site and turned up nothing else. His job now was to check the records and find out which kids had gone missing a decade ago. Around that time he’d been intent on practising law. Had someone told him he would end up becoming a policeman and working in CID, he would’ve laughed in their face. No money and no respect in police work, he would have said. He’d been right back then. He was right now. At least if he’d become a lawyer he might have been able to help the DI, something at which he was failing spectacularly as a cop.

He selected ‘print’ and went to pick the page up. Only then did it register that the drawing was in colour. The tree printed out in black, the body in a lurid red. The message had been written in purple. All this seemed to reinforce his earlier suspicion that the girl was an attention-seeker. It was a game to her, a way of keeping her mother on her toes, or perhaps punishing her in some way.

McNab had an uncomfortable memory of the variety of ways in which he’d subtly punished his own mother for failing to produce his father. For years he’d secretly convinced himself that his dad was trying to see him and being prevented from doing so. It had taken a long time to register that his father didn’t care that he existed at all.

Claire had been quite adamant about not being married. Angry, even. So who the hell was Nick?

McNab didn’t want to go there.

He screwed up the drawing and went to toss it in the bin then changed his mind and stuck it in his pocket. He had enough to worry about without taking on childcare duties, especially a problem child.

He abandoned his desk and went looking for DC Clark.

‘Hey.’

Janice’s sympathetic look didn’t help. McNab had told everyone he’d been responsible for the assault. It didn’t make any difference. If the boss went down, the team would hold him responsible.

Janice handed him a list. ‘That’s UK-wide. D’you want to extend it to Europe?’

‘Is there anything here that might match?’

‘Hard to say with what we’ve got on the remains so far. In truth, it could be all or none of them.’

‘Better extend it to Europe.’

Barriers had been down for a while, the flux of immigrants from the Eastern Bloc steadily increasing. Rhona had said that a child’s remains didn’t last long above ground, even with the covering such as these had had. Her guess of a decade or so was just a guess, until she concluded her study of the detritus from the deposition site.

McNab took the list back to his desk. Janice had identified twelve possibilities. Eight girls and four boys. Over half of the list were believed to have been abducted by an estranged parent and taken abroad. One girl was thought to have been taken to California by her Russian father.

A child being abducted by a parent was often the most likely explanation for their disappearance, especially when custody had been awarded to the other parent. Most people who ran off with their children were never found. If your partner took your child abroad, the UK government could not bring them back, only offer you legal advice. But estranged parents rarely murdered the children they were fighting so hard to keep.

McNab concentrated on the others.

Four girls, two boys. All would have been between six and ten at the time of their abduction. All had disappeared south of the border, and the abduction sites were varied: London, Birmingham and the North of England. McNab stared at the photographs. Little faces, frozen in time. He thought about his first sight of Emma sitting under the tree. His elation that they’d found her alive – every mother’s dream – then his horror when he saw what she was holding.

One of the photographs was of a smiling, elfin-faced girl with light-coloured hair, cut so short she could have passed for a boy. She’d last been seen in the company of a middle-aged man in St Pancras station in London. The second girl was dark haired and older, of Indian extraction. She’d disappeared in Birmingham on her way home from school. One boy had a freckled face and ears that stuck out like the handles of the Scottish Cup. He was from Sunderland. These three disappearances had taken place over a two-year period.

The road where the accident had happened ran from Glasgow to the village of Muirkirk. The village itself wasn’t remote. It lay on the A70 between Edinburgh and Ayr, just ten miles from the M74 motorway, the main artery between Scotland and England.

McNab fished out a map. On his way to the scene of the accident, he hadn’t passed a single car on that road. True, it had been a bad night and folk had been warned not to travel, but even on his subsequent visits to the site vehicles had been scarce.

He thought about Claire’s conviction that there had been a man on the road. She’d insisted McNab take his description down on his PDA. He suspected believing in the figure was one way of convincing herself she wasn’t to blame for the accident and its consequences.

The man was short, Claire had said, and wore a dark, heavy coat. Initially his back had been towards her. That was why she hadn’t seen him. He’d turned and her headlights had lit up his face. He was middle aged and bald.

When McNab asked whether she’d hit the man, she’d shaken her head. ‘I wrenched the wheel round to avoid him. That’s why I went off the road.’

He logged into the incident files and had another look at the photographs. The team had taken a whole series from multiple angles showing where the car went off the road, the marks on the bank indicating how it had overturned and slid down. The one of the wreckage against the tree was pretty scary. Claire was lucky to have climbed out of that unscathed. As for the rear of the car crushed against the tree – Emma’s survival was little short of a miracle.

McNab replayed the geography in his head. Claire had said the figure had his back to her. So where was he facing? McNab rotated the 3D image on the screen, placing himself in the picture where Claire said the man had stood. Why had the mystery man been standing in the middle of the road looking towards the wood?

14

The majority of foods are plant based, and food remains undigested after death until the body starts to decay. Digestive erosion and volume of food can also help identify the time elapsed since the last meal. The body in the skip had been damaged by fire, but the food in his stomach was as it had been at the moment of death.

Sissons had sent through the stomach contents, retrieved at the post-mortem. They made an interesting study. Rhona was used to examining the remains of various Glasgow eating habits; McDonald’s and Burger King, pizza and chips, kebabs and curries.

These were more interesting.

Beetroot soup with dumplings was not a Glasgow speciality. Assuming the victim didn’t have a mother at home preparing his favourite meal, he must have eaten at a restaurant that served this type of food.

It didn’t take long to find a possibility. There were several restaurants that had borscht on their menu, but only one that claimed to be authentically Russian, so Rhona decided to try them first.

The phone rang a couple of times before it was picked up. Rhona could hear violin music and chatter in the background. Lunchtime at the restaurant sounded popular. The voice that answered was female with an accent, possibly Polish. When Rhona asked to speak to the manager, the girl called out a name that sounded like ‘Misha’ and a man came on the line.

Rhona explained who she was and why she was calling. His voice was deep and slightly accented. ‘Beetroot soup with dumplings. A speciality of ours.’ He laughed. ‘By all means come and try some.’

Mikhail Grigorovitch was younger than Rhona had envisaged on the phone. She’d always imagined Russian men as elderly, stocky and Cossack-hatted, watching tanks roll past, as in newsreels taken at the height of the cold war. Mikhail was the exact opposite.

He offered her a warm handshake and urged her to call him Misha.

‘You will eat, of course?’

‘I really came to take a sample.’

‘It’s important to taste what you sample.’

Misha called over a small, dark-haired waitress with eyes darkly rimmed like Amy Winehouse’s.

‘Borscht for the lady.’

He waved Rhona to an old church pew with the number 207 carved on the back. As she waited for her soup to arrive, she took in the rest of her surroundings. The place was simply furnished but stylish, the accent on colour and all things Russian. On a nearby wall was a painting of hens in a wintry birch wood, a setting sun bathing the scene in an orange-red glow.

The soup arrived, accompanied by Misha, who slipped into the seat opposite. Rhona liked beetroot, at least the pickled variety. She wasn’t so sure about beetroot soup with fat little dumplings floating in it.

Misha gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Try.’

She took a spoonful. It was surprisingly good.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’

‘Delicious.’

‘And the dumplings?’

She broke open a dumpling. It tasted light and savoury. ‘I like them.’

Misha sat back, satisfied by her response.

‘Finish,’ he encouraged, ‘then we talk.’

On the last spoonful, Rhona made an excuse and escaped to the toilet. The interior was decorated with the music of famous Russian composers. She chose the cubicle papered with the work of Rachmaninoff. Then she washed her hands and checked her mouth for beetroot stains, slightly disconcerted that it seemed important to look good.

Misha was awaiting her return. He eyed her appreciatively.

‘You should finish with a shot of vodka. I recommend Stolichnaya.’

‘A bit early in the day for me.’

‘You’re driving?’ He looked disappointed.

‘No.’

‘Then what is the harm?’

The vodka bottle arrived, accompanied by two shot glasses.

‘You like whisky?’

Rhona nodded.

‘This is smoother. No burning of the throat.’

He filled both glasses and lifted one, encouraging Rhona to do the same.

‘
Na zdorovie!
’

Rhona watched him swallow, then followed. Misha was right. It was smooth.

‘Good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Another?’

‘Definitely not.’

Misha shrugged, accepting defeat.

‘So, you are a forensic scientist, like in
CSI
?’ His brown eyes sparkled.

‘Not quite. I don’t wander round crime scenes dressed in my best clothes, looking like a movie star.’

‘Tell me why a forensic scientist wants to sample my food.’

Rhona chose her words carefully. ‘A man died in suspicious circumstances. I believe he ate soup like this shortly before that happened.’

Misha looked horrified. ‘You think we poisoned him?’

‘He didn’t die of food poisoning,’ Rhona reassured him.

‘Then why are you here?’

‘It might help us trace his movements in the time leading up to his death.’

‘We are not the only place to serve borscht in Glasgow. All eastern European people eat this soup. Polish, Ukraine . . .’

‘I know.’

‘You have a photograph of this man?’

Rhona shook her head. ‘There was a fire.’ She didn’t elaborate.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Sunday night.’