morgue was unnaturally bright and airy for this time of night, the overhead lights sparkling off the dissecting tables and chiller cabinets. It was nearly as cold in there as it was outside. A heavy layer of disinfectant almost managed to hide the stench of corruption from this morning’s post mortem. The smell of David Reid.
He arrived just in time to see the little girl being unloaded from her oversized body-bag. She was still wrapped in the packing tape, only now the shiny brown strips were dusted with white fingerprint powder.
Logan’s heart sagged. It was Isobel, not one of her deputies, who stood on the far side of the stainless steel table, directing the little body into place. She was dressed in her cutting gear, the red rubber apron still clean and free from gore. The Procurator Fiscal and the corroborating pathologist were already there, dressed in coveralls, discussing the body with Isobel as she described the rubbish tip where it had been discovered.
She looked up as Logan approached, annoyance shining out from behind her safety goggles, and pulled down her surgical mask. ‘I thought DI Insch was SIO on this case,’ she said. ‘Where is he this time?’
‘He’s interviewing the suspect.’
She snapped the mask back into place and muttered her displeasure. ‘First he skips the David Reid post mortem and now he can’t even be bothered to attend this one. I don’t know why I bloody bother …’ Her complaints trailed off into silence as she prepared her microphone and then went through the opening preliminaries. The Procurator Fiscal cast a disapproving glance at Logan. Clearly he agreed with Isobel’s reading of the situation.
The shrill bleeping of Logan’s mobile phone cut across her listing of those present and she hurled a furious scowl at him. ‘I do not allow mobile phones to be used during my post mortems!’
Apologizing profusely, Logan dug the offending article out of his pocket and switched it off. If it was anything important they’d call back.
Still seething, Isobel finished off the introductory procedure, selected a pair of gleaming stainless steel scissors from the tray of instruments and began to snip away at the packing tape, documenting the state of the body as it was uncovered.
Underneath the tape, the little girl was naked.
A big chunk of hair threatened to come away as Isobel tried to unwrap the child’s head. She loosened it with acetone, the sharp chemical smell cutting through the room’s antiseptic tang and underlying perfume of decay. But at least this body hadn’t been lying in a ditch for three months.
Isobel replaced the scissors on the tray and her assistant started packing the tape into labelled evidence bags. The body was still curled up in a foetal position. Gently Isobel worked the rigor out of the joints, flexing them back and forward until she could lay the little girl out flat on her back. As if she was just sleeping.
A blonde four-year-old girl, slightly overweight, with numerous bruises on her shoulders and thighs, the contusions dark on her waxy skin.
A photographer Logan didn’t recognize was snapping away as Isobel worked.
‘I’ll need a good head and shoulders shot,’ Logan told him.
The man nodded and perched over the cold, dead face.
Flash, whirr, flash whirr.
‘There’s a deep incision between the left shoulder and upper arm. It looks like …’ Isobel pulled at the arm, opening up the deep gash. ‘Yes: it goes all the way down to the bone.’ She prodded the cut surfaces with a gloved finger. ‘It was inflicted some time after death. A single blow from a sharp, flat blade. Possibly a meat cleaver.’ She moved in so close to the incision that her nose was almost touching the dark-red flesh. She sniffed. ‘There is a distinct smell of vomit in the region of the cut …’ She stuck out a hand. ‘Pass me those tweezers.’
Her assistant did as he was told and Isobel ferreted around in the wound, finally emerging with something grey and gristly.
‘There are signs of partially-digested food in the wound.’
Logan tried not to picture the scene. Failed. ‘He was trying to cut her up,’ he sighed. ‘Trying to get rid of the body.’
‘And what makes you think that?’ Isobel asked, one hand resting lightly on the little girl’s chest.
‘God knows there’s enough talk of dismembered bodies in the papers. He wants to get rid of the evidence, so he tries to hack it up. Only it’s not as easy as it sounds. Just trying it makes him sick.’ Logan’s voice was hollow. ‘So he wraps her up in packing tape, stuffs her in a bin-bag and puts her out for the scaffies to take away.’ In London they might be refuse disposal operatives, but in Aberdeen they were scaffies.
The Procurator Fiscal actually looked impressed. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You may well be correct.’ He turned to Isobel’s assistant, Brian, who was busy popping the bits of gristle into a little plastic tube. ‘Make sure that gets sent off for DNA analysis.’
Ignoring them, Isobel opened the child’s mouth, peered in with a tongue depressor and recoiled. ‘She appears to have ingested some form of household cleaner. Quite a lot of it from the state of her mouth. The teeth and skin all show signs of corrosive bleaching. We’ll get a better idea when we get to the stomach contents.’ Isobel closed the child’s mouth with one hand, the other supporting the back of the blonde head. ‘Hello …’ She beckoned the photographer closer. ‘Take one of this. The back of the head has suffered a severe concussive blow.’ Her fingers moved, probing the hair just above the spot where the skull met the neck. ‘This wasn’t a blunt object, but something wide that tapered to a point.’
‘Like the corner of a table?’ asked Logan, not liking where this was going.
‘No, it would have to be sharp, solid, like the edge of a fireplace, or a brick.’
‘Was it the cause of death?’
‘If drinking bleach didn’t kill her … I won’t be able to say until I’ve opened up the skull.’
There was a bone-saw lying on the trolley by the table. Logan didn’t want to watch what was going to happen next.
Damn Detective Inspector Insch and his little bloody daughter. He should have been the one standing here watching a four-year-old getting cut up into little chunks, not Logan.
Isobel ran the scalpel blade from behind one ear, all the way across the top of the head to the other, slicing through the skin. Without even flinching, she dug her fingers into the wound and pulled, peeling the scalp forward like a sock. Logan closed his eyes, trying not to hear the sounds as the skin separated from the underlying muscle structure: like breaking up a head of lettuce. Exposing the skull.
The teeth-rattling shriek of the bone-saw echoed around the tiled room and Logan’s stomach lurched.
And all the way through it Isobel kept up her detached, emotionless narrative. For once he was glad they weren’t seeing each other any more. There was no way he could have her touch him tonight. Not after this.
Logan stood outside the front door of Force Headquarters under the concrete canopy, looking
