The Turning Tide (6 page)

Iain whistled low as he looked more closely at the corpse. ‘It gets better,’ he said. ‘Or worse, if you’re this poor sod.’ Whoever had put the body in the bag had trussed the man up first. Iain gestured to Dougie to come over and indicated where the hands had been tied behind the back. ‘What’s this – some kind of jewellery?’ Iain asked.

‘Looks that way,’ Harriet said. The photographer leaned in and started snapping away.

‘Well, what do we have here,’ he said and held the object up to the light. It was a braided length of leather with metal ornaments – possibly silver, though tarnished and mottled. ‘Some kind of jewellery,’ he said. ‘That is probably more use to us than wherever the bag came from.’

‘Did that happen . . . I mean, do you think he was tied up before . . . or after?’ Dougie said.

‘You mean was he tortured?’ Iain thought for a moment. ‘Could have been. Difficult to tell in this state.’ Evidence of struggle might indicate that, if they were able to find defensive wounds on the body. Or if there were other signs, like broken bones that had happened perimortem – around the time of death. Damage to internal organs might be a clue – ruptured kidneys or liver sometimes pointed to extreme beating. But all of that would depend on what survived the decomposition.

Iain arranged the freed arms in a more natural position now. The wrists were marked from where they had been tied. The skin had come away from the flesh underneath, making it look as if the man was wearing a pair of thick latex gloves. ‘That’s his skin,’ Iain said. ‘Fingerprinting not impossible, but a chore.’

‘How’d you do that, then?’ Dougie asked. His eyes were narrowed, as if he was trying to let as little of what he was seeing in as possible.

‘Couple of ways,’ Iain said. ‘You need to fill out where it’s gone slack to pick up the fingerprint ridges.’ They sometimes had luck injecting the slipped skin with saline. ‘Or we might be able to peel it off and stick it on Alastair’s hand like a glove.’ He laughed, his teeth bared; they were like crooked tombstones in an old cemetery ground. The photographer looked like he wished he never asked.

According to MacLean, the people who had found the body were camping out on the north end of Raasay when it was discovered. Some English couple up on a holiday. The woman was fine but the man was a shattered wreck after seeing it. ‘Going tae cost us a fortune in Victim Support,’ Alastair had grumbled, as if police budgetary concerns were more important than a potential murder investigation.

Harriet read over the notes from the scene and the interview with the couple. Not much information there – two kayakers, no other witnesses to the discovery. The bag was caught on the underside of a boat when they came to shore. The woman had a forensic science degree, so knew not to move or touch anything, and radioed for help straightaway. Unless it was some elaborate double bluff, they probably had nothing to do with it. She noted that no one had thought to take
DNA
samples from them anyway. One more thing to follow up on later . . .

‘Race?’ she asked Iain.

‘Mmm, probably white, but let’s wait and see,’ Iain said. He caught the photographer’s curious look. ‘This far along, the skin can do all sorts of things. And what time doesn’t do, water will. I’ve seen black men bleached white and white people so far gone you’d swear they were from Africa. Until we have an ID, no way to know, but judging on his features and where we are, probably white.’

Iain plucked a nail clipper from the rack of sterilised instruments and picked up one of the dead man’s hands. He carefully trimmed the middle three nails and put the clippings in a plastic envelope, then chucked it at the kid. ‘Make sure Alastair logs that and gets it to the lab,’ he said.

‘Bet you twenty pence you get nothing off those,’ Harriet said. ‘The guy was in the water for weeks. Any genetic evidence is long gone.’

‘Twenty pence? You’re on,’ Iain said. He turned to the kid and winked. ‘You never know what you might turn up. There was one time, we had a ten-year-old pit of burned bone shards in Cerska—’

‘Iain, no one’s interested in hearing your
RNA
extraction story again,’ Harriet sighed. ‘That was ages ago.’ She turned to the photographer. ‘The way he goes on you would think he judged the tribunal himself.’

Iain tipped the corpse’s head back on a plastic block. ‘Get some pictures of his wallies,’ he said, and pointed to the teeth, exposed from the absence of lips. The teeth were big and square and mostly straight. Iain pulled gently down on the mandible and peered inside. No obvious fillings, no denture. ‘Not much to go on here,’ he said to Harriet, who nodded. ‘Dental records probably won’t help much.’

Harriet Hitchin frowned at the body. ‘So, apart from the bag I don’t see anything that absolutely excludes the possibility that the death was natural or self-inflicted . . .’ she said.

Iain raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean apart from the tie on his hands?’

Harriet glanced at it. ‘Could have been an autoerotic accident,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen more extreme.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said. ‘But in a bag?’

‘Remember that spy?’ Harriet said. ‘The one who zipped himself in a locked suitcase in the bath? This guy isn’t even locked in.’

‘Aye, sure. But I’m betting that fellow didn’t also have a cut neck,’ Iain said.

‘What cut neck?’

Iain ran his finger across the stiff’s chin, brushing where a deep gouge spanned the neck from ear to ear. The edges were nibbled just as the lips and eyelids had been, but it was clearly a cut made by a knife. The photographer raised the camera to his face and started snapping.

Iain smirked at the doctor. ‘See? Even the kid can see the cut,’ he said. ‘First day and all.’

‘Uh, well,’ Harriet said. ‘Hard to tell when decomp sets in.’

‘The body’s in bad shape, but not that bad,’ Iain said.

‘It could still be self-inflicted,’ she said.

Iain shook his head. ‘Man ties himself up, cuts his own throat, then zips himself in a bag and throws himself in the sea. Possible? Sure. Likely? Nae chance.’

Harriet crossed her arms. ‘Iain, who’s the pathologist again?’

‘You are, Professor,’ Iain said. She wasn’t a professor any more, not after an inquiry into poor record keeping in Leeds threw her expert witness statements into question. It hadn’t been enough for her to lose her license, but her career would never recover. If she went back to England, it was unlikely the Home Office would have her as one of their pathologists again.

‘It’s Doctor, please,’ she corrected.

‘Of course, Doctor,’ Iain said, and smiled. He hadn’t forgotten. Her reputation for sloppy work preceded her, and even if it hadn’t, a simple Internet search would have revealed it. Harriet Hitchin never spotted the windup. Nae sense of humour.

‘Right, enough of what we can see; now let’s get to what we can’t see. Will you open up?’ she asked.

Iain nodded. The pathologist was meant to do this part but he didn’t mind getting on with it. First he made a y-shaped cut below the neck and down the chest. He loosened the skin and fat from the abdomen by wiggling his finger underneath; the layers separated from the muscle easily. There was no need for the rib shears today. The sternum and fronts of the ribs, softer than they would have been in a fresh body, came away easily using a bread knife.

Iain’s tattooed arms sunk in the opening he had created and freed the organs. He kept a large PM-40 scalpel handy to loosen the connective tissues, but it was unnecessary and they pulled free with ease. Even so, the organs were in better shape than he expected – from the cold water, probably. He took out the heart and lungs together, then the liver, stomach and kidneys in another block. It all went into a washing-up basin.

He went back to the body and prised the skin of the neck away from the muscles, slowly and carefully excising the trachea and tongue. The cause of death was clear: the deep and fatal cuts to the throat. Iain put a white plastic ruler for scale next to the cuts. He guided Dougie to the shredded trachea to make sure there was a photographic record of the damage that had gone deep into the tissue.

‘Oh, now that’s interesting . . .’ Iain wormed his little finger under a thin arch of bone.

‘What’s that?’ Dougie’s voice grew high and thin. Iain hid a smirk. He knew the tone of voice well; by his estimation they would be mopping up vomit or peeling the newbie off the floor in five minutes’ time, ten at most.

‘The hyoid bone,’ Iain said. ‘It didn’t look fractured at first, but it is.’

‘Which means what?’

‘Well,’ Iain crossed his arms over his aproned chest, seemingly unaware of the brown fluid dripping off his gloves over his front, ‘we often see them broken in strangulations. So, this could be a strangulation gone wrong.’

‘Could be. Or . . . ?’ Dougie gulped.

‘Or, it could have happened when whoever was getting rid of the body stuffed him into the bag. Tough to tell either way.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s a thin bone, and the fracture point is pretty high in post-mortems where violence is involved,’ he said. ‘Not being connected to anything makes it more vulnerable to breaking.’

Dougie had passed through the sweating stage to the stage where he was just clammy and shivering. Iain reckoned the lad had a minute on his feet, tops.

‘Doctor, are you after the head?’ Iain asked Harriet. He set up a side table with a face mask and the skull saw, but hadn’t peeled back the scalp yet.

‘No thanks,’ she said, looking up from where she was poring over the X-rays Iain had taken earlier. ‘It’s brain soup in there. We have a cause of death, no point going further.’

Ian grunted his assent and unfurled a black bit of plastic from a roll.

‘What’s that?’ Dougie asked.

‘Bin bags – ten for one of your fine Scottish pounds at the supermarket in Cameron Bridge,’ Iain said. ‘Best deal on the high street.’

‘No, I mean what’s it for?’ Dougie asked. His voice was as weak as a sick child’s.

‘This is for the organs when the examination’s finished,’ Iain said. He started scooping the organs from the washing up basin into the bag with his hands. In the periphery of his vision he saw the photographer pitching and rolling like a ship on the sea. ‘Normally they go back in the abdomen and we pop the ribs back on. Then it’s stitched up. But this one’s a wee bit far gone for an open casket, wouldn’t you say?’ He had hardly finished the sentence when Dougie’s limp body hit the floor.

‘Bloody hell, not another one,’ Harriet Hitchin said. ‘Iain, hold his feet up while I get the smelling salts.’ She strode across the room to the first aid kit by the sink. It rarely saw action apart from fainting photographers and students. Not much call for first aid in a mortuary, seeing as most of the visitors there were already dead. ‘And tell Alastair to stop bringing us the newbies.’

The sound of a phone made them both jump. ‘New security doorbell,’ Iain said and gestured to a phone and screen on the wall. ‘Bet it’s Alastair. Typical of him to turn up now that all the action is finished. Go on, buzz him in.’

‘It’s not Alastair.’ Harriet checked out the black-and-white monitor. ‘This is going to sound odd, but . . . it looks a bit like that MP,’ she said. ‘You know, Morag the Moaner?’

‘A real live politician?’ Iain whistled. ‘Must be my lucky day. Well, let her in then.’

: 5 :

Morag Munro smoothed her silver streaked bob behind her ears and checked to make sure no one was was coming up the road. She was recognisable to most of the population of Cameron Bridge and if anyone saw her at the mortuary it would surely be the talk of the pubs for days. Luckily the building was halfway up a glen and off the tourist drag. Cameron Bridge was even deader up this end than usual.

No pun intended.

She rang again. If no one answered soon she would have to go, or else risk missing the second sleeper service. She had sent Arjun down to London on an earlier train. ‘I have some paperwork to finish up,’ she said, assuring him she would be back at Westminster and raring to go before nine a.m. tomorrow.

The door finally cracked open. ‘Good afternoon!’ she said, and gave her best neighbourhood-canvassing smile. Morag offered her hand to the scarecrow-haired woman in wellies and a green plastic apron who opened the door. ‘Is your supervisor here?’

‘I’m Dr Hitchin.’ Harriet’s plummy voice revealed her irritation at being mistaken for the help. ‘I’m the pathologist.’

Morag paused a moment. She should be able to recognise the UK’s forensic pathologists cold; there were only about thirty of them. ‘Harriet, I remember now,’ she snapped her fingers. ‘You were the Home Office path on the Bulgarian nanny trial in Leeds, yes?’ An infant had died in the care of a nanny, with the prosecution arguing hard that it was the result of shaken baby syndrome, not cot death. Harriet’s testimony had been key to getting the conviction, though that was overturned on appeal after her record-keeping scandal emerged. ‘Sorry for not recognising you sooner,’ Morag said.

Harriet stood aside and let Morag enter. ‘Thank you. I do what I can in service of the law,’ she said.

‘So what brings the Shadow Home Secretary here?’ Iain shouted through the open door of the post-mortem suite. ‘We’ve already gone and voted for your precious Union, there’s no one to impress now.’

‘Sorry, what did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the . . . I guess you call that music?’ She raised her eyebrows at Harriet.

‘Cannibal Coffin,’ Iain said. ‘Best zombie-themed band coming out of Scandinavia these days.’

Morag deployed her static smile. Christ, what a plonker. ‘Lovely,’ she said. She and Harriet walked to the threshold of the PM suite. ‘I was passing through, on my way back to London tonight. National preparedness for mass disasters is coming up in committees and I thought that it would be good to have a chat with a manager here, to see how we’re prepared in the Highlands. In case there’s anything the facility needs from the Home Office to get up to scratch.’

Her eyes wandered over the walls, illuminated with flickering fluorescent lights. Outside the mortuary was nondescript, hardly discernible from the many ramshackle farm buildings on the edge of Cameron Bridge. Inside it looked like a horror set. Forget contingency plans and emergency preparedness. What the place needed was a wrecker’s ball.

‘Iain, turn the music off or I will,’ Harriet growled. He grumbled an oath in response but the racket stopped, severing Cannibal Coffin mid-wail.

‘Thank you so much,’ Morag said. ‘Do you think the facility would need any particular improvements to deal with a localised or regional crisis?’

‘What sort of improvements?’ Iain loped over to them. Morag’s sharp eyes took him in one look, from the rounded shoulders and heavy fists of a pub brawler to the cynical and pinched face of a disappointed Yes voter. Her fingers started to drum lightly against her thigh. This was a variety of man she knew well. The kind who had joined the SNP in their droves after the referendum with promises to vote her out, but with any luck had forgotten to turn up on polling day. All mouth and no kilt, as her father would say.

‘I think upgrading the facility is an excellent idea,’ Harriet Hitchin said. ‘We can never be too prepared for what might befall us.’ She paused. ‘If you need someone to head up a survey of the mass disaster capacity in Scotland . . .’ she babbled hopefully.

Morag could hear the edge of longing in Harriet’s voice, the hope for escape from this backwater, this go-nowhere post. Useful. She filed that titbit away on her mental Rolodex. She craned her head and tried to peek round the corner. ‘Could I perhaps see the rest of the building, or are you in the middle of something? I mean apart from the death metal?’

‘There’s a PM on,’ Harriet said. ‘Post-mortem, I mean, not the Prime Minister, ha ha.’ Morag smiled weakly. ‘You’re welcome to come through but it’s a ripe one.’ She pointed to a neatly folded lab coat. ‘Put this on over your clothes and grab a pair of wellies.’ She looked at Morag’s shiny red heels. ‘You’re a braver woman than me: I wouldn’t chance the pavements here in a pair of shoes like that.’

‘Years of practice,’ Morag said. That, and a stubborn refusal to let visiting Cameron Bridge mean she should take a day off from looking professional. No one seemed to take any pride in their appearances any more, not in her opinion. The number of people trudging up and down the high street in rigger boots and joggers was appalling. Only slightly better were the outdoor gear brigade in top-to-toe North Face all year round. Fleeces and walking trousers were for the hill, not the office.

Harriet walked back over the low divider on the floor. Morag shucked her red shoes in the corridor and slipped into a pair of rubber boots. She tiptoed over the barrier but hung back slightly as the smell hit her. She couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned, but this was beyond foul. Almost sweet, like shit and cake. ‘You know what, I’ll watch from here,’ she said, putting a hand over her nose and mouth.

Iain grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her towards the handwash station. ‘Don’t be daft, lass, you’re here, might as well muck in. Scrub up.’ He threw a pair of gloves at Morag and she reluctantly washed her hands and followed him to the examination table.

‘Is it anyone special?’ Morag asked, crinkling her nose as they stood round the body. She longed for a handkerchief, some perfume, anything.

‘Body from up in Raasay, by Skye,’ Harriet said. ‘A couple of kayakers found it washed up on a beach.’

‘I think I read about that in the paper this morning,’ Morag said. ‘Rum business. What a terrible tragedy.’

‘All in a day’s work,’ Iain said. A few tissue samples had been put aside to send to the toxicology lab, but the rest was otherwise untouched.

Morag looked at the body, then looked quickly away. It was too late. The image of the black and green torso, cut open and splayed like a carved Christmas turkey, was already burned on her retinas. The head lolled back, supported by a white plastic block, displaying the cut throat and lidless, horrible eyes.

She tried not to gag, but words were slow to come. ‘I’m sure the fiscal and the police will have it solved soon,’ she eventually said. She looked round. ‘Are you on your own? No police to witness the procedure?’

Iain looked at the clock on the wall and shook his head. ‘Ali MacLean was meant to be here for the PM, but I think he’ll have sneaked off for his tea by now.’ He clocked Morag’s look, the one that said she expected no better from the local constabulary. ‘He’s a good man, that MacLean, you know,’ Iain said. ‘His dad was mates wi’ yer husband’s dad, as I understand it.’

‘Mmm.’ Morag turned back to Dr Hitchin. Obviously, with a career like hers, what was most important to the constituents was who her father-in-law had been friends with. The Highlands never changed. ‘Any ideas on who the body might be? Such a terrible thing to have happened, and right on our own doorstep.’ Her eyes were starting to water now – how on earth did they stand the smell?

‘He’s a bit of a mystery man at the moment,’ Harriet said. ‘His hands are in poor shape for fingerprinting, no ID on the body or the bag. With luck it won’t stay that way. We’ll get an approximate age off the bones and his stature and compare those against missing persons. If there’s a match, we can get family
DNA
and confirm it. Or we might get lucky and get dental records, you never know.’

‘I guess any evidence you might use for catching the murderer is probably destroyed, too?’ Morag asked.

‘It depends,’ Iain said. ‘Why, is there something you want to tell us?’ He chuckled until Harriet shushed him.

‘We don’t know yet,’ Harriet said. ‘Since he was in the bag, there might be a chance of some evidence surviving under his fingernails. It’s a matter of the lab trying to extract genetic material and seeing what they come up with.’

‘Interesting,’ Morag said. ‘And this takes, what, a few hours? A few days?’

‘If we’re lucky, days. Could be weeks or longer.’ Iain said. ‘Or months, depending on what the path labs have on their schedules already. It’s not like that rubbish you see on the television, with all those magical hologram databases instantly matching enhanced
CCTV
images to your ID cards and that nonsense, you know. Maybe as Shadow Home Secretary that is something you ought to know about—’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Harriet sighed and turned back to Morag. ‘You know, this is refreshing. It’s so nice of you to take a keen interest in our work. The details will all be in my report,’ she said. ‘Anyway, about the rest of the facility. Iain can give you a tour if you like?’

Morag’s eyes widened. ‘No, I think I’ve seen enough for now,’ she said. ‘Train to catch. Don’t worry, I can let myself out.’ She spun on her heel and marched towards the door, leaving star-struck Harriet trailing in her wake.

Morag Munro left so quickly that she forgot to take her shoes. And she never even noticed the photographer lying on the floor, much less the quiet click of his digital camera snapping away.