a favour?’ said the doctor, handing his medical bag to Watson.
She stood silently while he popped the case open and dug out a pair of latex gloves, snapping them on as if he was a surgeon.
‘Give us a bittie room then,’ he told the bustling IB people.
They stood back and let him get at the body.
Doc Wilson took hold of the ankle with his fingertips, just below the joint. ‘No pulse. Either this is yer genuine severed limb, or the victim’s dead.’ He gave the leg an experimental tug, causing the rubbish in the bag to shift and the IB team to hiss in pain. This was their crime scene! ‘Nope. I’d say that leg’s weil an’ truly attached. Consider death declared.’
‘Thanks, Doc,’ said Logan as the old man straightened himself up and wiped his latex gloves on his trousers.
‘Nae problem. You want us tae hang around till the pathologist and the Fiscal get here?’
Logan shook his head. ‘No sense in us all freezing our backsides off. Thanks anyway.’
Ten minutes later an Identification Bureau photographer stuck his head round the entrance to the tent. ‘Sorry I’m late, some idiot went for a swim in the harbour and forgot to take his kneecaps with him. Jesus, it’s bloody freezing out there.’
It wasn’t much warmer inside, but at least it was out of the rain.
‘Afternoon, Billy,’ said Logan as the bearded photographer unwrapped himself.
The long, red-and-white-striped scarf was stuffed into a jacket pocket, followed by a red bobble hat with ‘UP THE DONS’ stitched into it. He was bald underneath.
Logan was stunned. ‘What happened to your hair?’
Billy scowled as he clambered into his white paper rompersuit. ‘Don’t you bloody start. Anyway I thought you were dead.’
Logan smiled. ‘Aye, but I got better.’
The photographer polished his glasses with a grey handkerchief, and then did the same with the lens of his camera. ‘Anybody touched anything?’ he asked, spooling a fresh reel of film into place.
‘Doc Wilson gave the leg a tug, but other than that it’s fresh.’
Billy snapped a huge flashgun onto the top of the camera, smacking it with the side of his hand until it emitted a high-pitched whine. ‘OK, back up ladies and gentlemen …’
Hard, blue-white light crackled in the confined space, followed by the clatter-whirr of the camera and the whine of the flash. Again and again and again …
Billy was almost finished when Logan’s phone went off. Cursing, he dragged it out of his pocket. It was Insch, looking for an update.
‘Sorry, sir.’ Logan had to raise his voice over the battering rain on the tent’s roof. ‘The pathologist isn’t here yet. I can’t get a formal identification without moving the body.’
Insch swore, but Logan could barely hear him.
‘We’ve just had an anonymous call. Someone saw a child matching Richard Erskine’s description getting into a dark red hatchback this morning.’
Logan looked down at the pale blue, naked leg sticking up out of the garbage. The information had come too late to save the five-year-old.
‘Let me know as soon as the pathologist gets there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Isobel MacAlister turned up looking as if she’d just stepped off a catwalk: long Burberry raincoat, dark-green trouser suit, cream high-collared blouse, delicate pearl earrings, her short hair artistically tousled. Wellington boots three sizes too big for her … She looked so good it hurt.
Isobel froze as soon as she was inside, her eyes fixed on Logan dripping away in the corner. She almost smiled. Placing her medical case down on top of a bin-bag, she got straight to business. ‘Has death been declared?’
Logan nodded, trying not to let his voice show how much the sight of her disturbed him. ‘Doc Wilson did it half an hour ago.’
Her mouth turned down at the edges. ‘I got here as soon as I could. I do have other duties to perform.’
Logan winced. ‘I wasn’t implying anything,’ he said, hands up. ‘I was just letting you know when death was declared. That’s all.’ His heart was hammering in his ears, drowning out the pounding rain.
She stood her ground, staring at him, her face cold and unreadable. ‘I see …’ she said at last.
She turned her back on him, covered her immaculate suit with the standard white boiler suit, pulled on her tiny microphone, recited the standard who, when and where, and got down to work.
‘We have a human leg: left, protruding from a refuse sack from the knee down. Big toe has been subject to some form of laceration, probably post mortem—’
‘A seagull was eating it,’ said Watson, getting a cold smile for her pains.
‘Thank you, Constable.’ Isobel turned back to the stiff leg. ‘Big toe shows signs of predation by a large sea bird.’ She reached forward and touched the pale, dead flesh with her fingertips. With pursed lips she started pressing her thumb into the ball of the foot, feeling the toes with her other hand. ‘I’ll need to get the remains out of the bag before I can give you any estimated time of death.’ She motioned for one of the IB team to come over and made him spread a fresh plastic sheet on top of the shifting floor of rubbish. They dragged the bag with the leg sticking out of it from the pile and onto the sheet. All the time Billy flashed and whirred away.
Isobel hunkered down in front of the bin-bag and slit it open with one smooth pass of a scalpel. Rubbish spilled out of the sack, caught by the plastic sheeting. The naked body was curled in a ball, held in the foetal position with brown packing tape. Logan caught a glimpse of pale-blond hair and shivered. Dead children looked smaller than he’d remembered.
The skin was a delicate shade of milk-bottle white between the swathes of brown sticky tape, faint patches of purple forming over the shoulders. The poor little sod had been upside-down in the bag and the blood had pooled in the lowest parts.
‘Do you have an ID?’ Isobel asked, peering at the small corpse.
‘Richard Erskine,’ said Logan. ‘He’s five.’
Isobel looked up at him, a scalpel in one hand an evidence bag in the other. ‘“He’s” not anything,’ she said, straightening up. ‘This is a girl. Three to four years old.’
Logan looked down at the bundled-up body. ‘You sure?’
Isobel slipped her scalpel back into its case, straightened up slowly and looked at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Medical degrees from Edinburgh University might not be all they’re cracked up to be, but one of the few things they did teach us was the difference between little boys and little girls. The whole absence-of-a-penis thing is kind of a giveaway.’
Logan went
