‘But you are a bad girl,’ the man said. ‘You’re disrespectful. You’re uncaring. You only ever think about yourself. Say it.’
‘I’m not,’ Zoey had cried, slinking away from him in the back seat. ‘I’m not bad. You don’t know me.’
At that, the man had climbed out of the front seat and opened the rear door. He was tall. His close-set eyes were such a dark shade of brown that Zoey couldn’t discern pupils from irises. He smelled. As he leaned over her, grabbing a handful of hair to wrench her off the backseat, she caught the whiff of rotten matter.
‘I’ll do whatever you want. You can … you can have sex with me. I won’t fight you. If you want me to be a bad girl for you then I can be. Okay? I can be whatever you want,’ she had whispered, turning her face away as he pulled her to stand against him.
‘You see? How many seconds did it take for you to show me exactly what you are? Say it to me,’ he said.
‘I’m a bad girl,’ Zoey had complied, as he’d grabbed a handful of hair and marched her along the driveway towards a cluster of trees at the rear of the garden. The freedom with which he’d paraded her had signalled the end of hope. There could be no one around to notice what he was doing if he was so confident that they wouldn’t be seen.
‘Touching her is against the rules,’ he had muttered as they walked. ‘No touching. None at all.’
She had lifted her head to peer over the boundary bushes. Not a building in sight save for the one she was destined to enter. No one to hear her scream.
An owl hooted in the trees above her. Zoey had always loved owls. A snuffling sound came from the verge beyond her line of sight. It’s Warrior, she thought. Warrior’s coming to sit with me, and I’ll be with Daddy again. Nothing to be scared of any more. The stars reflecting in her eyes went dark. Edinburgh’s autumn was set to be long and cold.
Detective Inspector Luc Callanach brought his car to a halt on the verge of Torduff Road. A pair of curious horses watched passively over a six-bar gate as blue flashing lights destroyed the early morning peace. Pulling a hoodie over his t-shirt, he checked the time. Five thirty in the morning. The crime scene investigators were in the process of erecting floodlights around the scene to make up for the lack of sunlight. The weak October rays wouldn’t touch the ground until six thirty at the earliest. DCI Ava Turner pulled her car up behind his and climbed out in sports gear that had already seen a work out that morning.
‘Do you never sleep?’ he asked, as they fell into step together.
‘Is it a French thing, using a question as a greeting? Because in Scotland we tend to say hello first. Surely you’ve been here long enough to know that by now. What do we know about the victim?’ she replied, rubbing her hands together furiously.
‘I haven’t seen her yet,’ he said, peeling off his gloves and handing them to Ava. ‘Put those on, it’s freezing out here. It’s quite a long way up the lane. The route’s long and narrow, heading south towards the reservoir, so the squad have sealed off a full mile section. Scenes of Crime are already getting started. I gather it’s a single victim, young adult female.’
Ava showed a uniformed officer her identification as they ducked under yellow tape. ‘The usual pathologist, Ailsa Lambert, is on leave at the moment, so who’s looking after the body?’ she asked.
‘I am,’ a man replied from behind them. ‘Jonty Spurr. It’s nice to finally meet you in person, DCI Turner.’ He held out his hand, smiling. ‘Luc, it’s been a while. I would say it’s good to see you again, but not under these circumstances.’
‘Jonty,’ Luc replied. ‘What are you doing in Edinburgh?’
‘Stepping in for Ailsa while she looks after her sister. Had a stroke, I gather. I have a good deputy in Aberdeen, but you’re short-staffed here, so I’m on a temporary transfer. Shall we go and visit the young lady who’s waiting for you?’ he asked, handing them suits, boots and gloves. As they dressed, the forensics team erected an awning beneath the trees a few metres ahead of them, and the sound of a generator sent birds flying from the nearby woods. ‘Sorry about that, seems incredibly loud out here,’ Jonty said. ‘The body is getting covered in leaves and water droplets, hence the tent. You’ll need to keep your distance. There’s a substantial area covered in blood and we don’t want to disturb the trail. Have either of you had breakfast yet?’
‘Only coffee,’ Ava said. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve had two of my people lose their stomach contents so far this morning. We don’t need any more distractions,’ Jonty replied.
‘We’ve both been doing this long enough to keep our lids on,’ Ava said. ‘But thanks for the warning.’
They trod slowly forward on the white matting path beneath the canvas roof, avoiding stepping to either side and contaminating whatever articles of evidence might be lying there. Dr Spurr went ahead of them and hunkered down next to a small mound that was covered by a forensics sheet. He lifted it slowly, as if trying not to wake a baby.
Callanach looked away. Ava covered her mouth with a hand. There were crime scenes, and then there was carnage. Whatever had happened to the young woman on the ground fell firmly into the latter category.
‘Luc, call the station. Ask them if they have a young woman listed as missing in the last forty-eight hours. Just say between sixteen and twenty, long brown hair, red-brown dress. No other description for now,’ Ava instructed Callanach.
‘It’s not,’ Jonty said.
‘Not what?’ Callanach asked.
‘It’s not a coloured dress,’ Jonty replied. He slid a gloved hand under the girl’s left shoulder to raise her a few inches off the floor, exposing a small section of the dress behind her shoulder blade. The bright white patch of cotton glowed in the floodlights.
Ava took in a sharp breath. ‘It’s a white dress?’ she muttered. ‘How the fuck did she …’
Jonty answered the question by raising the hem up over the girl’s thighs and abdomen. A massive section of skin had been cut from her stomach, the raw sections of flesh curling back where her body had begun to dry out. Blood was crusted over the whole of her lower half, washing down her legs and her bare feet.
‘That’s not all,’ Jonty said. ‘There’s another equally large section of skin cut from her back. Her underwear was missing when we found her. I was preserving the scene for you to see it first-hand.’ He stood up, covering the girl again as he pointed along the road in the opposite direction from which they’d come. ‘She crawled several metres along the road. There are pieces of skin in the tarmac, which we believe came from her hands and knees. The bleeding increased as she crawled. We’ve found two large wads of wound packing that must have dropped away from her, both completely blood-soaked. Whoever left her here gave medical assistance initially, then abandoned her to die where she almost certainly wouldn’t have been found until it was too late.’
They stood silently, contemplating the scene for a few moments. A tractor could be heard starting up in the distance. The wind rushed noisily over the expansive reservoir to the south. It was a place of extraordinary beauty, just a few miles south of the Edinburgh City Bypass, and now it was home to a ghost.
‘She was on her back,’ Ava said. ‘You think she collapsed from her knees and rolled?’
‘No, she’d have stayed face up if she’d simply collapsed. There’s not enough of a gradient for gravity to have moved her. I believe she stopped crawling and decided to rest. Or gave up hope. She’d have been delirious