Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (11 page)

'Yes,
sir. And a video.'

'Good.
On you go then; get down under the bridge; take plenty of still and video shots
of the body
...
and focus on the way
it's been trapped. Once you've got enough, bring him out and lay him on the
walkway.'

He
looked around and saw a uniformed Inspector on the other side of the street.
'Bert!' he called across. 'Have you got screens here yet?' The man nodded.
'Good. Set them up down there, to block off the view from the houses opposite.'
He smiled briefly as he thought of Rhian, stood in his garden for sure waiting
for the excitement to begin.

The
two-man diver team, cameras fetched from their van, flopped awkwardly down the
steps which led from the bridge to the Water of Leith Walkway, and as they did,
a dark blue Vauxhall Vectra pulled up beside Martin. Dan Pringle heaved himself
laboriously from the front passenger seat and walked round behind the car. Martin
grinned; the Superintendent enjoyed his Saturday nights. He guessed that he had
called him just in time.

'Where
is he then, sir?' he asked, through his thick moustache.

'About
twenty feet below where you're standing right now. I've just sent the recovery
team down. I didn't want him in the water any longer than necessary.'

'Any
idea how long he's been in there already?'

'I
didn't look at him that closely, only at the bits that were sticking out of the
carpet he's wrapped in; they didn't look especially puffy, but maybe the
constraint of the binding restrains the bloating process. We'll get an idea in
a minute, once the guys get him out.'

Pringle
and his driver, Detective Constable Ray Wilding followed Martin down the steep
steps to the walkway. It was approaching ten o'clock, but summer nights in
Scotland seem to last for ever, and so there was enough light for them all to
see the divers working under the bridge.

They
waited while they finished their task of filming and photographing the corpse
in situ,
then,
with the cameras secure on the shore, they watched the two men free the dark
bundle from its entrapping branch and carry it, like pallbearers, from under
the bridge. Martin and Wilding, both younger and fitter that the middle-aged
Pringle, took it from them as they passed it up, grasping the burden by the
cords which secured the carpet, carrying it behind the screens which the
Inspector had erected and laying it gently, face down, on the ground. As they
did, the smell of it reached them for the first time. The Head of CID found
himself hoping that it would carry all the way up to the gawpers outside the
Hilton.

'Any
more film in the still camera?' Pringle asked the divers.

'A
few shots,' the older of the two replied.

'You'd
better take some as we do this.' He bent and rolled the shrouded body on to its
back. 'Fuck,' he whispered as he looked at the face - or at the place where a
face should have been. The man had been battered beyond recognition. His nose
had been pounded flat, his eyes smashed in their sockets, his lips torn to
ribbons by broken teeth as they had been ground to fragments.

'Someone
definitely had it in for you, mister,' Pringle murmured. He seized one of the
cords which tied the carpet. 'Bugger. How are we going to get this undone?'

'No
problem,' said Martin. He took a big clasp knife from the pocket of his jeans,
knelt beside the body and cut the twine with single strokes, then stood to
watch as Wilding unrolled the carpet.

The
dead man looked to have been in his forties, with a roll of fat around the
waist but not completely gone to seed. He had been of no more than medium
height. The body was naked from the waist down. The legs were twisted and
grotesque; they had been battered as badly as the face and head. Two big
crosses had been carved into his torso with a knife, through his blue shirt.
Martin glanced down at the genitals; the penis was tiny and shrivelled from its
immersion, but the area seemed intact.

'I
don't think he can have been in the water for more than a day,' he said. As he
spoke, one of the divers leaned over the body and took a close-up shot of the
smashed face.

'That's
not going to be much bloody use to us,' grunted Pringle.

'What
do you mean?' asked Martin.

'I
mean we can hardly stick that in the
Evening
News
with a "Do you
know this man?" caption. His mammy wouldna' know him now. I tell you, sir,
we could have a job even identifying this one, let alone finding the bloke who
did this to him. We don't even know where he was put in the Water. Even
supposing it was only half a mile upstream, that takes in a lot of territory.'

'You
should check the missing persons list, first off,' said the Head of CID. 'As
for a picture, if we need one, I'll ask the pathologist to brief an artist, or
put together a photo fit. Too bad Joe Hutchison's away; he's done a lot of work
on facial reconstruction. 'You'd better consult the Drugs Squad and Criminal
Intelligence. See if there are any turf wars going on that we don't know
about.'

'Whereabouts?'

'Any-fucking-whereabouts.
For all we know this guy could have been killed in another city and dumped
here. Let's hope we get lucky, and soon; otherwise -1 agree with you, Dan; we
might never put a name to this bloke.'

12

The
key players in the Alec Smith investigation team were gathered in the command
vehicle when the Head of CID entered, five minutes after ten on Sunday morning,
with Karen Neville following behind: DCI Maggie Rose, standing nearest to the
door, studying a report; Mario McGuire, Steve Steele, three detective
constables
...
and Sarah Grace
Skinner.

Martin
glanced around the group and knew at once that they had been waiting for him.
It had taken him longer than he would have liked to extricate himself from
Rhian, even though he had postponed their promised discussion until the
evening. He had called Karen, on a whim, reasoning that she had been in at the
start of the investigation and therefore that she should be kept in touch with
its progress.

There
had been another consideration too. If he were to become heavily involved in the
unpredictable affair of the Water of Leith floater, he might need her as
liaison in both investigations.

'Sorry
we're late, Mags
...'
he began.

'I
know,' the DCI answered. 'Traffic. The Sunday drivers start early when the
weather's good.' For a second he thought that there might have been a touch of
sarcasm in her comment, but he rejected it at once. Maggie just wasn't made
that way.

'I'm
a bit surprised you're here at all, actually. I heard about last night's
business on the radio. Has Dan made any progress?'

'He
won't, until he gets an identification; and he's a long way off that. Missing
persons drew a blank and so far we've had nothing from the fingerprints.
Sarah's booked to do the post-mortem this afternoon.' He glanced across at her,
while still speaking to Rose. 'I'm going to ask her if she can draw us a
picture of the guy.'

'Eh?'
The woman detective looked puzzled.

'His
face was smashed in - and I mean smashed in. You'd have thought his head had
been run over by a car.'

'What
makes you think it wasn't?' asked Sarah, walking towards them.

'I
don't know that it wasn't,' he conceded. 'You'll have to tell us for sure. But
my guess is that if it had been, the whole skull would have been crushed. In
fact, all the head injuries seemed to be facial.'

'We'll
see about that. It's for later, though.'

'Sure,'
he agreed. 'Maggie, this is your briefing. Do you want to begin?'

She
nodded, sending a ripple through her glossy red hair. 'Yes, let's do that.
Okay, everyone,' she called. 'Attention please. I've called this meeting to
update everyone with progress in the investigation into the death of DCI Alec
Smith. On the face of it, we haven't achieved a great deal over the last
thirty-six hours, but everyone's worked hard to eliminate certain
possibilities, if nothing else. We've also found out more about the way in
which Mr Smith was killed.

'As
you know, the person who killed Mr Smith fancied himself as an amateur
film-maker. He used the victim's camcorder to make a very explicit movie, then
left it for us to find at the scene. Some of you have viewed it
...
those who needed to. Those who haven't,
but feel the need, may do so, but
believe
me, it won't add anything to your lives.

'The
video didn't answer all our questions. Alec Smith was a very neat man. Everything
in his house was carefully arranged; everything had a purpose, and when we
found him, everything was in its place. So the first thing we wondered was how
he was overpowered.

'DO
Smith was a big man, yet he was trussed up like a turkey and hung up on a hook,
ready to be butchered, and this was achieved without any sign of a struggle. A
mystery, yes, but thankfully no longer. Dr Skinner has come up with the answer.
Sarah, if you would.'

The
pathologist pushed herself from the desk on which she had been sitting. 'Thank
you, DCI Rose.' She looked around the group. 'Yes, a real puzzle, huh? Like the
DCI said, the victim was a big man; in his fifties, but physically very fit.
His legs were very powerful, indicating that he did a lot of walking, or
cycling, or both. In addition to that, those of you who saw him at the scene
will have observed that - apart from the injuries which were inflicted while he
was being tortured to death - there were no other marks on the body.'

Detective
Sergeant Steele raised a hand. 'What about the head injuries, Doctor? Couldn't
he have been knocked out by a blow to the head, then strung up?'

'No.
Don't believe the movies, Stevie. You don't just hit someone on the chin arid
knock them out. Even in professional boxing it's unusual for someone to be
rendered completely unconscious for more that a few seconds. It takes a hell of
a blow to do that, a severe concussion, and generally speaking the bigger the
person, the more force would be needed.

'If
Mr Smith had been hit hard enough to allow his attacker to strip him naked, tie
him, then haul his limp body up on that hook, I'd have been expecting to find a
skull fracture and probably a significant injury to the brain. I would not have
expected him to be as alert and aware as the man we saw at the start of that
video.

'No.
The head injuries were inflicted after death.'

Karen
Neville raised a hand. 'Need there have been a struggle? Need he have been
stripped? Couldn't this have been a sex game that turned into something else.'

'Wouldnae
mind a game with her.' In the lull, Detective Constable Faxon's aside to
Detective Constable Morrow was no more than a whisper but, as Sarah paused, it
carried to the Head of CID. He shot DC Faxon a look that threatened to strip
the flesh from his bones, but Karen cooled the moment with a laugh. 'You're not
built for it, Constable,' she murmured.

'Shut
up, Faxon,' snapped DCI Rose. 'Sorry, Sarah.'

'That's
okay, boys will be boys.' She looked across at Neville. 'As a matter of fact,
Sergeant, when I began my examination I considered that the likeliest
possibility. It might even have explained why the genital area was burned to a
crisp; to destroy the possibility of DNA traces remaining from a sexual
encounter.

'But
that wasn't the case. Mr Smith was subdued, and he was stripped. When I turned
the body over, before beginning dissection, I found a puncture wound in the
middle of the back. I examined this minutely and found fibres compressed into
it. I sent them to Arthur Dorward at the lab and he confirmed very quickly that
they came from the shirt which was found at the scene.

'Subsequent
analysis of the blood and tissue samples showed that the victim was shot in the
back with a tranquilliser dart. The substance used was Immobilon; it's commonly
used in zoos and other places to sedate large animals. Whoever did it got the
dose right; it would have knocked him down instantly and rendered him helpless
for a few minutes, long enough for him to be made ready for what was to happen
to him. If they'd used too much it could have killed him. Vets have been known
to commit suicide with that stuff.'

'Does
that mean that we're looking for James Herriot?' asked Steele, without a
flicker of a smile.