Her mum and dad had often taken her to Broughty Ferry for summer holidays as a child; long days on the beach with fish suppers at Murray’s chippy on Gray Street and ice cream from Vissochi’s, which was further along on the other side of the road. It was at Vissochi’s that she’d lost a wobbly tooth while munching her way through the biggest knickerbocker glory she’d ever seen and had hidden it in case her mum made her stop eating. Holidays in the Ferry had meant regular trips into Dundee and she’d liked the place. Glasgow it wasn’t but not so bad for all that.
For years now it had understandably campaigned to get rid of its old tag as the city of ‘jute, jam and journalism’ and had rebranded itself the City of Discovery, owing to the fact that it had Scott of the Antarctic’s old boat as a tourist attraction. Narey couldn’t help but wonder what discoveries the city had in store.
CAHiD stood for the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification and was based in the College of Life Sciences, not far from the main University of Dundee building. A fearsome-looking middle-aged receptionist regarded Narey with some suspicion when she claimed she had an appointment to see Professor Fairweather. The woman directed Narey into a chair and said she would see if the professor was expecting anyone. Narey conceded to herself that her telephone chat with the prof might well have bypassed the front desk but she still wondered if everyone was subjected to this guard dog treatment.
The question was registered redundant a few minutes later when the receptionist was beaten back to the desk by a smiling blonde woman in jeans and a T-shirt, her hand outstretched in greeting. The frosty guard dog was trotting menacingly at her heels, clearly not happy at anyone else being welcomed into the house.
‘Sergeant Narey? I’m Kirsty. Come on through.’
‘Call me Rachel, please. Thanks for taking the time to see me.’
‘No probs. What you told me on the phone sounds very interesting, if mysterious. Annabelle, if anyone’s looking for me for the next…’ she looked at Narey questioningly, ‘hour? Yes, the next hour, then tell them I’ve flown to Baghdad.’
The receptionist nodded truculently and Narey took the opportunity to smile broadly and ironically at Annabelle as she passed on her way into the professor’s office. The old bag did her best to smile back grudgingly but failed miserably.
‘Sorry about Annabelle,’ Kirsty Fairweather said breezily as the door closed. ‘I inherited her from my predecessor and she’s a pain in the arse. Very efficient and all that but not exactly friendly. She thinks I should still be in school rather than running a university department.’
Narey wasn’t sure what she’d expected but Kirsty wasn’t it. Still, Fairweather’s reputation preceded her and Narey had read enough to know that the prof had been there, done it and bought the T-shirt. She’d worked in Iraq and Afghanistan on behalf of the United Nations, identifying bodies of victims as a prelude to war crimes tribunals, as well as featuring in some heavy duty murder trials in the UK — clearly not just a pretty face.
It struck Narey that it was a wonder the press hadn’t cottoned on to Fairweather’s youth and good looks and plastered her across the tabloids. She must have been fighting the bastards off with a stick, Narey thought.
‘Right, so tell me about your girl. I did a bit of Googling about her before you got here but it was all from donkey’s years ago so I thought I’d better wait and get the lowdown from you. They call her Lily, don’t they?’
‘The press did, yes. As in Lily of the Lake. It stuck. There was huge publicity, initially all over the UK, Crimewatch and the like, but after a while only in Scotland. Despite all that, she was never identified.’
‘Which is why you’re here?’
‘Basically, yes.’
‘And what about the non-basic?’
Narey didn’t much like being on the receiving end of an interrogation.
‘I have a personal interest in the case. I’d rather not go into it. All you need to know is that I am determined to find out who Lily was. And who killed her. She was brutally murdered and the person who killed her has never been caught.’
Fairweather held up a sheet of paper in front of her.
‘I know. I took the liberty of pulling copies of some of her file. Hope you don’t mind.’
Narey did mind. She had been hoping to keep this all under the radar as far as Central Scotland cops were concerned. The professor seemed to read her thoughts.
‘I’ve got a few contacts on CID over there and one or two of them owe me favours,’ Fairweather told her. ‘I asked a DI if he’d get me these with no questions asked and he agreed. You might know him — Marty Croy?’
Narey shook her head brusquely and Fairweather read the gesture for what it was.
‘He won’t say anything, Rachel. Not until you want him to.’
Narey gave a curt nod. She didn’t have much option but to accept it.
‘Have you seen these?’ the professor asked, holding the sheet up again. ‘It’s pretty nasty stuff.’
Narey didn’t say anything but held out her hand, trying to suppress the small surge of excitement in her stomach and thinking about how Tony felt in the same circumstances. Perhaps the only difference was she at least had the decency to feel guilty about it.
Fairweather passed the A4 sheet of paper over along with a handful of others. As she turned them, Narey saw that they were all high-quality prints of the original police photographs, all images of the batterered, bludgeoned head and decaying figure of the girl known as Lily.
‘Jesus,’ she gasped involuntarily, immediately annoyed at herself. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies.
‘Not nice, is it?’ Fairweather sympathised. ‘I’ve seen plenty and I’m sure you have too but there’s something particularly nasty about that being done to a girl half our age.’
Narey couldn’t disagree with the professor’s sentiments. She was faced with a picture of horror and its constituent parts leapt at her from the page: blackened, receding skin; broken bone; one blind eye; dirt-streaked blonde hair; bite marks.
Something lurched deep inside Narey, something far deeper than the guilty adrenalin rush at seeing these photographs. It was a memory and a knowledge and a determination all rolled into one instant. Danny Neilson had been right with something he’d said to her: in her desperation to help her dad and prove he’d been right about Paton, she was in danger of forgetting the girl at the heart of it. Her intention was right but her motive had been all wrong.
‘Pictures of Lily,’ Narey murmured.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s an old song. By The Who, I think. Sorry, I don’t know what made me think of that.’
‘Before my time,’ Fairweather grinned, her smile slowly disappearing, morphing into a frown. She looked at Narey.
‘Rachel, if you want my help to find out who she was and who did this to her, then I’m in.’
Narey’s eyes closed as she bobbed her head in agreement.
‘I do. I wanted to do all this myself but I’m not sure that’s possible. I do want your help.’
Another lengthy pause hung between them as Fairweather weighed up whether to ask the question Narey’s response begged of her. She decided against it.
‘Okay. It will take a bit of time and we’ll need Central’s permission to get the body exhumed. Marty Croy can help with that and it’s probably best if you meet him. From what I can see from the photographs, it should be a piece of cake.’
‘You’ll be able to put a face to her?’
‘I’m sure of it. There will be an amount of guesswork but it will be fairly accurate. The frustrating thing is that it could have been done back then with the right knowhow. It was what it was back in the nineties. We could and would have done so much more with her today. But, all being well, we still can.’