‘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 to ask the obvious question, but Isobel cut him off.
‘And no, I don’t mean it’s been removed like the Reid boy: it was never there in the first place.’ She picked her medical case up off the bin-bag floor. ‘If you want a time of death, or anything else, you’ll have to wait until I’ve done the post mortem.’ She waved a hand at the IB officer who’d rolled out the plastic carpet for her. ‘You: get all this crated up and back to the morgue. I’ll continue there.’
There was a quiet ‘Yes, ma’am’ and she was gone, taking her bag with her. But leaving a chill behind.
The IB officer waited until she was well out of earshot before muttering, ‘Frigid bitch.’
Logan hurried out after her, catching up as she clumped back to her car. ‘Isobel? Isobel, wait.’
She pointed her keyring at the car: the indicators flashed and the boot popped open. ‘I can’t tell you anything more till I get the body back to the morgue.’ Hopping on one foot, she pulled off a Wellington and dropped it into a plastic-lined box, replacing it with a suede boot.
‘What was that all about?’
‘All what about?’ She went to work on the other Wellington, trying not to get too much garbage on her nice new shoes.
‘Look we’re going to have to work together, OK?’
‘I am well aware of that,’ she said, tearing off the boiler suit, flinging it in with the wellies, and slamming the boot shut. ‘I’m not the one with the problem!’
‘Isobel—’
Her voice dropped twenty degrees. ‘Were you purposely trying to humiliate me back there? How dare you question my professionalism!’ She wrenched open the car door and climbed in, slamming it in his face.
‘Isobel—’
The window slid down and she looked up at him, standing in the pouring rain. ‘What?’
But Logan couldn’t think of anything to say.
She glowered at him and started the car, doing a three-point turn on the slippery road, before roaring off into the darkness.
Logan watched the car’s tail-lights disappear, cursed under his breath, and trudged back into the tent.
The little girl was lying where Isobel had left her, the IB team too busy bitching about the pathologist’s departure to carry out her orders. Logan sighed and hunched down in front of the pathetic, taped-up bundle.
The child’s face was almost completely hidden: the packing tape wrapped tightly around her head. The hands were taped together against her chest, and so were the knees. But it looked as if her killer had run out of tape before they could get the legs secured. That was why the left one had been poking out of the bag for a lucky seagull to nibble on.
He pulled out his phone and called in, asking if they’d had any reports of a missing girl, about three or four years old. They hadn’t.
Swearing softly, he punched DI Insch’s number in to give him the bad news. ‘Hello, sir? Yeah, it’s DS McRae … No, sir.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It’s not Richard Erskine.’
There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line, and then, ‘You sure?’
Logan nodded, even though Insch couldn’t see him. ‘Definitely. Victim’s a little girl, three, maybe four, years old, but she’s not been reported missing.’
Foul language erupted from the earpiece.
‘That’s what I said, sir.’
The Identification Bureau team mimed picking up the body and buggering off to the morgue with it. Logan nodded. The one who’d called Isobel a frigid bitch took out a mobile and called for the duty undertakers. It wouldn’t do to cart a dead child about in the back of a grubby van.
‘You think the deaths are connected?’ There was a hopeful edge to DI Insch’s voice.
‘Doubtful.’ Logan watched as the tiny corpse was gently rolled into a body-bag far too big for it. ‘Victim’s female, not male. Disposal’s different: the kid’s been wrapped up in a mile and a half of packing tape. No sign of strangulation. She might have been abused, but we won’t know until the post mortem.’
Insch