The Blackhouse (5 page)

Gunn said, ‘Mind you, even though they don’t chain the swings up any more, you’ll never see a kid using one on a Sunday. Just like you’ll still not see anyone hanging out their washing. Not outside of the town, anyway.’

A new sports centre hid Fin’s old school from view. They passed the Comhairle nan Eilean island council offices, and the former Seaforth Hotel opposite a terrace of traditional step-gabled sandstone houses. A mix of new ugly and old ugly. Stornoway had never been the prettiest of towns, and it hadn’t improved. Gunn turned right into Lewis Street, traditional harbour homes cheek by jowl with pubs and dark little shops, then left into Church Street and the police station halfway down. Fin noticed that all the street names were in Gaelic.

‘Who’s running the investigation?’

‘A crew from Inverness,’ Gunn said. ‘They were helicoptered in in the early hours of Sunday morning. A DCI, a DS and seven DCs. Plus a forensics team. They didn’t hang around once the balloon went up.’

The police station was a collection of pink, harled buildings on the corner of Church Street and Kenneth Street, next door to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Peking Cuisine Chinese Takeaway. Gunn drove through a gate and parked beside a large white police van.

‘How long have you been based at Stornoway, George?’

‘Three years. I was born and brought up in Stornoway. But I’ve spent most of my time in the force at other stations around the islands. And then at Inverness.’ Gunn slipped out of the car with a quilted nylon swish.

Fin got out of the passenger side. ‘So how do you feel about all these incomers taking over the investigation?’

Gunn’s smile was rueful. ‘It’s no more than I’d expect. We don’t have the experience here.’

‘What’s the CIO like?’

‘Oh, you’ll like him.’ A smile crinkled Gunn’s eyes. ‘He’s a real bastard.’

The real bastard was a short, stocky man with thick, sandy hair Brylcreemed back from a low brow. He had an old-fashioned face and an old-fashioned smell (was it Brut?), and Fin could have guessed he was a Glaswegian even before he opened his mouth. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Tom Smith.’ The chief investigating officer rose from behind his desk and held out a hand. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Macleod.’ Fin wondered if they all knew, and thought that they had probably been warned. Smith’s handshake was firm and brief. He sat down again, the sleeves of his pressed white shirt neatly folded up to the elbows, his fawn suit jacket carefully arranged over the back of the seat behind him. His desk was covered in paperwork, but there was a sense of order about it. Fin noticed that his thick-fingered hands were scrubbed clean, and that his nails were immaculately manicured.

‘Thank you.’ Fin’s response was mechanical.

‘Sit down.’ Smith spent more time looking at his papers than at Fin as he spoke. ‘I’ve got thirteen CID, including the local boys, and twenty-seven uniforms working on this. There’s more than forty officers on the island I can count on.’ He looked up. ‘I’m not sure why I need you.’

‘I didn’t exactly volunteer, sir.’

‘No, you were volunteered by HOLMES. It certainly wasn’t my idea.’ He paused. ‘This murder in Edinburgh. Do you have
any
suspects?’

‘No, sir.’

‘After three months?’

‘I’ve been on leave for the last four weeks.’

‘Aye. Right.’ He appeared to lose interest, and returned again to his paperwork. ‘So what grand illumination is it you think you’ll be able to cast on our little investigation here?’

‘I’ve no idea, sir, until I’ve been briefed.’

‘It’s all in the computer.’

‘I have a suggestion, though.’

‘Oh, do you?’ Smith looked up sceptically. ‘And what might that be?’

‘If the post-mortem hasn’t been carried out yet, it might be an idea to bring in the pathologist who did the PM on the Edinburgh murder. So we’ll have a first-hand comparison.’

‘Great idea, Macleod. Which is probably why I already had it.’ Smith leaned back in his chair, his self-satisfaction almost as overpowering as his aftershave. ‘Professor Wilson arrived on the last flight yesterday.’ He checked his watch. ‘PM should be starting in about half an hour.’

‘You’re not flying the body to Aberdeen, then?’

‘The facilities are good enough here. So we brought the mountain to Mohammed.’

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘Frankly, DI Macleod, nothing. I’ve got a perfectly good team here that’s quite capable of running this inquiry without your help.’ He sighed in deep frustration. ‘But HOLMES seems to think you might be able to say whether or not there’s a connection with the Leith Walk murder. And God forbid we shouldn’t do what HOLMES tells us. So why don’t you sit in on the postmortem, take a look at the parallel evidence, and if you come up with anything we’ll give it a gander. Okay?’

‘I wouldn’t mind casting an eye over the crime scene.’

‘Feel free. Detective Sergeant Gunn can give you the tour. The local boys aren’t really equipped to be of much use to us anyway. Except as dogsbodies.’ His contempt for everyone outside of his own team, including Fin, was clear.

‘And I’ll want to take a look at the files.’ Fin was pushing his luck. ‘Maybe talk to some of the witnesses. Suspects, if there are any.’

Smith pursed his lips and gave Fin a long, hard look. ‘I can’t stop you doing that, Macleod. But you might as well know that I expect to have this whole thing wrapped up in a matter of days. And just so you’re not under any illusion, I don’t believe there is an Edinburgh connection.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Call it instinct. People here aren’t very sophisticated.’ He smirked. ‘Well, you’d know that.’ He was tapping his pencil on his desk now, irritated by having to explain himself to a junior officer from another force. ‘I think this is a crude copycat killing. There were plenty of details published in the papers at the time. I think the killer’s a local man with a grudge trying to cover his tracks, trying to make us look somewhere else. So I’m going to shortcut the whole process.’ Fin resisted the temptation to smile. He knew all about shortcuts. He’d learned very early in life that they could lead you off on tangents. But DCI Smith was not privy to such wisdom. He said, ‘Unless the PM throws up something unexpected, I’m going to take DNA samples from every adult male in Crobost, as well as any additional suspects we might come up with. I figure a couple of hundred at the most. Economy of scale. A whole hell of a lot cheaper than a long-running investigation tying up officers in the field for weeks on end.’ Smith was one of the new breed of senior cops whose primary concern was the bottom line.

Still, Fin was surprised. ‘You have a DNA sample of the killer?’

Smith beamed. ‘We think so. Despite local sensibilities, we put out teams of uniforms to search the locus on Sunday. We found the victim’s clothes in a plastic binbag dropped in a ditch about half a mile away. The clothes are covered in vomit. And since the police surgeon is pretty sure the victim wasn’t sick, we have to assume the murderer was. If the forensic pathologist can confirm that, we should have a perfect sample of the killer’s DNA.’

II

In Church Street, and all the way down to the inner harbour, little hanging baskets of flowers swung in the wind, a brave effort to bring colour into grey lives. Pink- and white- and green-painted shops lined the street, and at the bottom of it Fin could see a cluster of fishing boats tied up at the quay, moving with the rise and fall of the ocean. A blink of sunlight caught the white boatshed on the opposite shore, and swept across the tops of trees in the Lews Castle grounds.

‘What did you make of the CIO, then?’ Gunn said.

‘I’d pretty much concur with your assessment.’ Fin and Gunn shared a grin.

Gunn unlocked the car and they got in. ‘Thinks he’s a superstar, that one. My old boss in Inverness used to say of the brass, they’re no different from you and me. They still have to get their legs out of their breeks one at a time.’

Fin laughed. He liked the image of DCI Smith struggling to get his stocky little legs out of his trousers.

‘Listen,’ Gunn said, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the inside line on the pathologist. I didn’t even know he was on the island. Shows you how much they’re keeping
me
in the loop.’

‘That’s okay.’ Fin brushed the apology aside. ‘Actually, I know Angus pretty well. He’s a good guy. And at least he’ll be on our side.’ They backed out into the street. ‘Why do you think Smith’s not attending the PM himself?’

‘Maybe he’s squeamish.’

‘I don’t know. A man who uses that much aftershave can’t be too sensitive.’

‘Aye, right enough. Most corpses smell better than he does.’

They slipped out of Kenneth Street on to Bayhead, heading north out of town. Fin looked from the passenger window at the children’s playpark, the tennis courts, the bowling green, the sports ground beyond and the golf course on the hill behind it. On the other side of the street, tiny shops were crammed together beneath the dormer windows of flats above. It almost felt as if he had never been away. He said, ‘Friday, Saturday nights in the eighties, the kids used to cruise up and down here in their old bangers.’

‘They still do. Regular as clockwork, every weekend. Whole processions of them.’

Fin reflected on what a sad existence it was for these kids. Little or nothing to do, strangled by a society still in the grips of a joyless religion. An economy on the slide, unemployment high. Alcoholism rife, a suicide rate well above the national average. The motivation to leave was as compelling now as it had been eighteen years ago.

The Western Isles Hospital was new since Fin’s day, replacing the old cottage hospital on the hill below the war memorial. It was a fully equipped, modern facility, better than many of those serving urban populations on the mainland. They turned in off Macaulay Road, and Fin saw the low, two-storey structure built in shallow angles around a sprawling car park. Gunn drove to the foot of the hill and turned right into a small, private parking area.

Professor Angus Wilson was waiting in the mortuary room. His goggles were pushed up over his shower cap, his mask pulled down below his chin, pushing out a thick beard of fusewire copper shot through with silver. He wore a plastic apron over green surgical pyjamas covered by a long-sleeved cotton gown. On the stainless steel table in front of him he had laid out plastic sleeve covers to protect his forearms, a pair of cotton gloves, a pair of latex gloves, and the characteristic steel-mesh glove he wore on his non-cutting hand to guard against an accidental slip of the blade. He was impatient to begin.

‘About bloody time!’ A twinkle in his green eyes betrayed the outward appearance he liked to give of bad-tempered eccentricity. It was an image he cultivated as an excuse for the rudeness that was almost expected of him now. ‘How the hell are you?’ He held out a hand to shake Fin’s. ‘Same killer, is it?’

‘That’s what you’re here to tell us.’

‘Godforsaken bloody place! You’d think if there was anywhere in the world you could get fresh fish this would be it. I ordered plaice in the hotel last night. Aye, and it was fresh alright. Fresh out the fucking freezer and into the deep-fat fryer. Christ, I can get that in my own house!’ He looked at Gunn and leaned over the table to pull the folder from under his arm. ‘Is that the report and the photographs?’

‘Aye.’ Gunn held out his hand. ‘DS George Gunn.’ But the professor had already turned away to look at the report and lay out the photographs. Gunn withdrew his hand self-consciously.

‘You’ll find head covers, shoe covers, goggles, masks and gowns in the pathologist’s room across the hall.’

‘You want us to put them on?’ Gunn said. Perhaps, Fin thought, he hadn’t been at a post-mortem in a while.

‘No.’ Professor Wilson wheeled around. ‘I want you to gather them into a little pile and set them on fire.’ He glared. ‘Of course I want you to put the fucking things on. Unless you want to catch AIDS or whatever viral particles might be lurking in the bone dust that’ll fill the air when we take the oscillating saw around the victim’s skull. Alternatively, you can stand out there.’ He waved a hand towards the large window that opened on to the corridor beyond. ‘But you’ll not be able to hear a fucking thing I say.’

‘Jesus,’ Gunn said, as they pulled on their protective clothing in the pathologist’s room. ‘And I thought the CIO was bad.’

Fin laughed, and almost stopped dead at the sound of it. It was the second time he had laughed today, and he hadn’t laughed in such a long time. Becoming aware of it, whatever he had thought amusing was quickly choked off by a tidal wave of returning emotion. He took a moment to recover himself. ‘Angus is okay. His bark’s worse than his bite.’

‘I’d be frightened I caught rabies if he bit me.’ Gunn was still reeling from the sharp edge of the pathologist’s tongue.

When they went back into the mortuary room, the professor had spread photographs across almost every available space. He was examining the victim’s clothes on the table. The stainless steel was covered by a large sheet of white butcher’s paper to collect any stray fibres or dried particles of vomit that detached themselves from the material. The victim had been wearing a zip-up fleece over a white cotton shirt and blue denim jeans. Big, dirty-white misshapen running shoes sat on the end of the table. The pathologist had slipped on his protective gloves and was holding a square magnifying glass in his left hand and picking delicately at the dried vomit on the dark blue fleece with a pair of tweezers. ‘You didn’t tell me the victim was my namesake.’

‘They never called him Angus,’ Fin said. ‘Everyone knew him as Angel. You could send him a letter addressed to Angel, Ness, Isle of Lewis, from anywhere in the world and it would get to him.’

DS Gunn was shocked. ‘I didn’t know you knew him, Mr Macleod.’

‘I was at school with him. His younger brother was in my class.’

‘Angel …’ Professor Wilson was still focusing on his tweezers. ‘Does he have wings?’

‘The nickname was ironic.’

‘Ah. Maybe that explains why someone wanted to kill him.’

‘Maybe it does.’