The Blood of Crows (3 page)

It might just be in Partick’s jurisdiction.

But even if it was, it was nothing to do with her any more.

0.45 A.M.

Lambie and Anderson had stripped their shirts off and were sitting in Lambie’s car with the heating on full blast, Anderson with the tartan travelling rug from the back seat wrapped round him, while his sergeant had pulled on a T-shirt from his gym bag and wore a damp towel wrapped round his shoulders. DCI MacKellar’s face appeared, and Lambie wound down the window.

‘You two OK?’

‘Not particularly,’ said Anderson.

‘You should both go home. We’ll clear it all up in the morning.’

‘If it’s all the same, I’d rather stay here.’

‘Not necessary,’ said MacKellar. ‘Not necessary at all.’

‘I’d rather wait until she’s away.’ Anderson didn’t look at MacKellar. They had said about ten words to each other in the three months Anderson had been at Partick Central.

‘There’s nothing for you to do. You have DC Mulholland at the coalface, so to speak, and O’Hare and two boats are down there. We’ll look after her. So, go home. Now. Everything else can wait. And there will be health and safety issues arising from this – but I don’t have to tell you two that.’

MacKellar walked back towards the mass of lights and vehicles at the edge of the quay.

‘Health and safety issues!’ Anderson’s voice was incredulous. ‘Fucking health and safety?’

‘We went in the water without life vests on. That’s a breach of protocol. We’ll get a form to fill in.’

‘In triplicate. In crayon.’ Anderson pulled his blanket round him, letting a shiver run its way through him. ‘I don’t see what more we were expected to do.’

‘I think we were expected to do less.’

‘I tell you, David, the day I leave a wee girl chained in the river on a rising tide because of fucking health and safety regs is the day I –’ Anderson’s words were caught in a cough.

‘The day you what? Emigrate?’

9.35 A.M.

Anderson slid his jacket from his shoulders and slumped into the nearest empty seat, feeling as though he had already worked a full day rather than being just about to start one. Today was supposed to have been a quick review of the forensic fire report and then a chat with O’Hare, half an hour to type it all up, then home. It was the first
proper day of the school holidays, and Brenda had plans for a family outing to Largs, remortgage the house to buy ice creams, and have some of the quality family time that Brenda was always on about.

But last night had changed all that. He had simply put fifty quid on the mantelpiece and left Brenda sleeping.

He wouldn’t forget last night for a long time. The girl had been so young. His daughter Claire was only a few years older. Some, he knew, would say that he shouldn’t be doing the job at all if he ever got so desensitized that a ten-year-old could die in his arms and he could go home afterwards for a good night’s sleep. He couldn’t get that noise out of his head, that incessant quiet whimpering. And that one word she had said with complete clarity. He couldn’t understand it, but it remained imprinted on his brain –
Motchka
?
Mamoska
? Something like that.

She didn’t scream, didn’t even try to keep her head up. Had she even known they were there, he and Lambie? How long had she been there? What sort of state had she been in when they chained her in place?

And who did it?

And why?

But they were not his questions to answer. He had waited for the case to be assigned by DCI MacKellar only to be rewarded by a single-line email asking him to provide a written report for DI Davis, who would now be heading up the investigation into the death of the girl. Anderson was to remain on the Biggart case. Anderson got that familiar feeling that his promotion was being ever so gently put on the back burner. The charitable side of his nature told him MacKellar would have his own staff –
staff he knew well, staff who were probably just as deserving of a DCI post as he was. The uncharitable side of his nature swore profusely.

Why bother with the Biggart case in the first place? The minute he was dead, another drug dealer would take his place.

The thought had just flitted across his mind when another email popped into his inbox, this time from a DI in B Division. It was a brief report, asking for any intelligence about an incident on Tuesday the 15th of June. The small country village of Balfron had been dragged into Glasgow’s drugs war. Two dealers had been shot in the head, the third in the face, and the bodies lined up neatly against the wall. Red heroin with a street value of three grand had been left at the scene. There was a further note on the email explaining that red heroin was heroin mixed with chalk, typical of the supply coming from Afghanistan via the Baltic States. Anderson smirked at the village cop needing to explain that. In the city, red heroin was almost currency – called ‘red’ because of its Russian route as well as its slightly rusty colour. The DI had added for interest that Glasgow was emerging from a heroin drought and the latest estimated value of the drugs trade was over five million pounds annually.

So, there was another drugs war kicking off. What was the point of trying to stop it? Scum would always settle at its own level. But he thought he remembered a similar email naming three major dealers who had unaccountably sold up and left the city. Anderson pressed Print and watched the skinny, pock-ridden faces of ‘Smoutie Waites’, ‘Hamster’ and ‘Speedo’ slide out from the printer.

Anderson sighed; it all seemed pointless. At some point today he would be summoned to a meeting about the breach of health and safety protocol, and he would just have to button it and not argue. To get his promotion he needed a clean sheet.

He thought about going out to the machine for a coffee to wake himself up, but the coffee here was terrible – the asbestos at the old station posed the lesser health risk. Asbestos or not, he wished they were back at Partickhill with Costello to moan at. He wished she would text him on her way in, asking
Do you want anything?
He wouldn’t even mind if she nicked all the chocolate Hobnobs and stuck them in her drawer.

Anderson smiled to himself.

‘You look happy, DI Anderson. Are you sure you work here?’ asked DC Wyngate, who had come equipped for the day with a tact bypass.

‘Yes, unfortunately. Are there any Hobnobs in the tin?’

‘It’s the Partick biscuit tin and we are not allowed to touch.’

‘So much for team spirit,’ said Anderson.

Wyngate picked up the printouts from Anderson’s desk. ‘They look like three charmers. Known associates of Biggart?’

‘No idea yet, but stick them up on the wall.’

Once Wyngate had made sure the A4 sheets were on the wall in perfect alignment, he sat down and flicked open his spiral-bound sheaf of papers. ‘I heard about last night, sir. It sounds a bit grim.’

Anderson nodded. ‘It was.’

Wyngate found the page he was looking for and passed
it to Anderson. ‘It’s the forensic fire investigator’s report on the Biggart incident. Do you want to read it? It makes very interesting reading.’

‘Paraphrase for me. Please.’

‘Well, they mocked up Biggart’s front room and the fire damage in some fancy computer program, just to confirm their suspicions.’

‘Good for them.’ Anderson looked at the floor plan of the fire scene in Apollo Court, as the building was named (in honour of its previous life as a cinema). Small crosses and odd symbols dotted the plan. He wondered how quickly he could get away to see O’Hare at the mortuary, then go home. It was too bloody hot in the office.

Wyngate placed a single sheet in front of him with a key for the symbols on it. ‘Are you going to the funeral this afternoon?’

‘Nearly. I’m going to the morgue. I have to look at Mr Biggart. So, this is where he died.’ Anderson looked at the plans, the position of the body. ‘Sorry, what funeral?’ he asked as an afterthought.

‘A retired constable, Tommy Carruthers, died last week.’

‘Did he work here?’

‘Presume so. Loads of the Partick boys are going.’ Wyngate angled his head to make sure nobody was listening. ‘He flung himself out his living-room window. Three floors up.’ He looked up at his boss. ‘Did you not hear about that?’

‘Must have passed me by. But no, I’m not going. I’ve to meet O’Hare at the mortuary in an hour … to deal with this …’ He tapped the report for emphasis. ‘I think Mr Biggart is still in residence in a drawer there. And as far as
I’m concerned, he can stay there until the winter when he can be put out to feed the birds.’

‘At least he’d be some use then,’ Wyngate said cheerily. ‘Fiona Morrison wants you to phone her if anything about this confuses you.’

‘So, tell me what it’s all about.’

The constable started pointing at the plan with the tip of his pen. ‘Door there, window there, body in that corner. The usual scenario would be that Billy here is pissed, smoking, falls asleep in his chair, drops cigarette, is overcome by fumes and gets toasted. This is different. Biggart staggers a bit before the smoke gets him, in his bare feet, wearing a shell suit.’ Wyngate held his pen up. ‘So, Billy is found by the window, over here, and the source of the fire is to the right of the door, over here.’ He tapped the diagonally opposite corner on the plan. ‘The positioning is important. Petrol and rags were set alight here in the corner and the window above the body was open, which would draw the flames across the room. Which makes it arson – skilful arson.’

‘And Biggart had soot in his airways,’ offered Anderson, showing that he had been paying attention at the initial briefing. ‘Which means he was alive when the fire took hold and he inhaled smoke. So that’s either culp hom or murder.’

‘Ms Morrison says the latter. And she can prove it in court. And there’s more.’

Anderson sat up. ‘OK, you have my full attention.’

‘Consider, the initial source of the fire is in the inner corner of the room. Yet Biggart is way over the far side, under the window. It’s as if he’d walked away from his escape route. Which raises the question, was he put there?’

‘Tox report was almost clear.’ Anderson pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, vaguely gesturing to his paper-laden desk. ‘A small amount of alcohol, nothing to incapacitate him.’

‘So, he could have walked out but didn’t. Are we thinking he was incapacitated in some other way? You should ask O’Hare if there were signs of him being bound.’

‘There’s nothing obvious on the crime scene photographs,’ said Anderson, flicking over to the photographs of the charred half-cooked mess, ‘but his legs looked like burned sausages, nothing much to see.’

Wyngate continued. ‘So, he’s lying here, face up, unable to move for whatever reason. The fire started over there in the corner nearest the corridor, billowed quickly up to the ceiling – heat and smoke would cover the ceiling in seconds – drawn by the open window away from the exit door. But the dangerous thing for him, and the interesting thing for us, is that the radiated heat from the ceiling would start to ignite anything below, most flammable first. So, drawn by the air from the window, soot in the smoke in the ceiling gets hotter and hotter and reignites, causing a flashover which would come right down on him.’

Involuntarily, Anderson twitched.

‘And judging from the charring and blistering on his torso, his chest in particular, his highly flammable shell suit simply melted on to him, like grilled cheese on toast. Incredibly painful. This means it was deliberate and extremely malicious. It indicates somebody who knows a lot about fires.’

‘I almost feel sorry for him,’ said Anderson.

‘And they think Billy was breathing, maybe even conscious, as the fire rolled over above him. And he didn’t do a thing about it. His clothes melting on to his skin, his skin blistering, his hair singeing. Ms Morrison says he might even have seen the fireball, before his retinas burned out. The reason why the fire investigation team have run this through their system again and again is … well, most arsonists would just splash some petrol about, fling in a match and leave. But not this guy. This set-up – the precise position of the accelerant – suggests he was keeping his exit clear for the longest possible period of time. It’s not unusual for arsonists to hang around the scene and get some thrill from the drama of the firefighters and all that, but according to Ms Morrison this guy set this whole fire so that he could hang about in the room and watch Biggart being grilled to death.’

11.03 A.M.

Costello was bored out of her mind. She was sprawling on her sofa, still in her pyjamas, thinking about eating breakfast, thinking about having a shower, thinking about getting dressed, thinking about the commotion on the river in the early hours. And that was three things more than she had managed to think about yesterday. She had been on sick leave now for five months, two weeks and two days. The team had been in touch, of course. They had phoned now and again, but there was less to talk about – and more awkward silences. They’d invited her to DCI Quinn’s leaving do, but she had declined. They just
wanted to drink, and she couldn’t. Nor could she drive, and she was still too wary of strangers and too wary of the dark to take a taxi.

She clicked the TV on to
Missing
, the occasional morning tear fest. The screen filled with Lorraine Kelly’s concerned face, holding the picture of a six-year-old boy. Something sparked a glimmer in Costello’s memory. She knew that face. Remembered the case. She picked up the remote control and turned the sound up.

Lorraine was now holding a book up to the camera.
Little Boy Lost.
‘Now, Simone,’ she was saying, ‘you can’t deny that this is a very sensitive issue to write a book about.’

The camera homed in on the face of the author, investigative journalist Simone Sangster. ‘Yes, I know, and that’s what makes it so important. Somebody had to be brave enough to write the book. It was a very tragic case. It still is today. Alessandro was only six years old when he disappeared, along with the babysitter, a family friend, who was just seventeen himself. Nobody has ever been charged with any crime relating to their disappearance, and I can’t help feeling that it’s a stain on the reputation of the Strathclyde police force that this boy, Alessandro Marchetti, could be kidnapped and his body never found. I feel that the families are owed a reinvestigation of this case. They need to know what happened that night, and to see those responsible brought to justice.’