‘Me too,’ Narey admitted. ‘I’m a police officer but I’m a person first. And you’d have to have a heart of concrete not to feel for this girl.’
‘Come on,’ Kirsten told her, taking her arm. ‘I think we should go meet her.’
Fairweather led Narey deeper into the department, opening a white door to reveal Barbie’s skeleton laid out on what looked like an operating table. Despite the glimpse when she’d emerged from the frozen earth in Brig o’ Turk, it was still a shock to see their girl lying there, her broken skull smiling up at the ceiling.
The professor went to the side of the lab and produced a hand-held device that looked to Narey like the speed scanners traffic cops sometimes used at the roadside. There were two metallic heads, however, rather than one and she advanced on Barbie’s prone frame, angling the device towards her.
‘It’s a laser scanner,’ Kirsten explained. ‘It’s called a FastSCAN Scorpion. There’s a single-camera version called a Cobra but the dual camera gives us more detailed scans in fewer sweeps and the cameras view the laser from both sides. It’s a great bit of kit: the entire system fits into a briefcase and we can take it anywhere.’
The professor began sweeping the Scorpion across the skeleton, steadily working her way from top to toe.
‘It feeds straight into our computer system as a 3D model,’ she continued. ‘It’s digitising her shape and surface contours as we speak. The areas we’ll have to reconstruct before we go much further are…’ Kirsten paused by the skull and gestured with her finger. ‘Obviously here… and here. The nose is missing, the eye socket badly damaged and parts of the forehead boss and coronal suture are also missing. But we can fix that.’
Narey must have raised an eyebrow at the casualness of the remark because Kirsten hurriedly explained.
‘We will mirror the missing area simply by making a copy of the existing side and creating a symmetrical skull. It’s a bit misleading, as we are all naturally asymmetrical, but it will be close. If we had part of the nose, then we could do the same thing but as it’s entirely missing, we’ll fill it in using one from a template of skulls to get one that fits. It can be very accurate. The good news is that the mandible is intact; the jawbone is the most difficult thing to recreate.’
Narey turned to the computer and saw that a 3D image of the girl was already on the screen. It was a million miles away from Inchmahome.
‘After we fill in the missing areas, we’ll dip into our database of muscles. They are all pre-modelled and we import them individually onto the frame. It’s the musculature map that gives us a detailed image of what she really looked like. That will probably be as far as we get today but I’m intending to come back first thing in the morning and continue from there.
‘We use sets of tissue depth data depending on where the subject came from. Obviously we know Barbie was a white European but if she was black African or, say, Korean, then we have data from there. When we get to that point, you’ll see little pegs over her face representing tissue depth and then we’ll put a layer of skin on top of that.
‘It’s all about using the clues we have. The teeth will tell us about the mouth, for example, and we can create its shape from there. If hair were found, as it was in this case, then we can input its colour and length. If there is clothing, then we can learn about stature. Normally, when we do facial mapping we don’t have as much to work on as we do here. We tend not to know skin colour, fat or thin. We’re in good shape with her, Rachel.’
‘So by tomorrow we’ll see her as she was?’
‘Yep. If we wanted to go all the way and have a 3D animated model, then that would take another two weeks. It can be a bit frustrating. We get from skull to face in two days; one day for muscles, one for skin; but it takes them a fortnight to add colour and hair. I’m guessing you don’t have that long.’
‘No, I don’t. Strange, isn’t it? We wait nineteen years to see her and suddenly we’re in a hurry that could literally mean the difference between life and death.’
Kirsten looked at her in confusion.
‘Not her life obviously, so whose?’
Rachel knew she’d said too much but instinctively she’d trusted Kirsten from the moment they’d first met.
‘Well, that’s the thing; I can’t be entirely sure. But I know if we can find out who she is, then we’ll be a lot closer to finding out who killed her. And if we do that, then we might just stop someone else from ending up the way she did. Put it this way: tomorrow can’t come soon enough.’
CHAPTER 45
Munn’s Vaults on Maryhill Road wouldn’t have been Winter’s first choice for a quiet drink and, coming just a few hours after he’d frozen his arse off at Brig o’ Turk cemetery, it was just about the last thing he needed. Still, he and Danny weren’t out for a social beer so it didn’t matter that they’d be surrounded by tracksuits, baseball caps, aggressive stares and the continual rattle of pool balls. Instead they’d sit quietly in the darkened pub and await their prey.
With its long, low frontage, Munn’s sat opposite boarded-up shops and scruffy tenements. Its neighbours were bookies, off licenses, To Let signs and abandoned buildings. To be fair, it had cleaned up its act from days gone by and the word was that the new owners didn’t stand for any trouble. First sign of bother and the offenders were chucked out and promptly barred from the premises. It still carried a reputation from past regimes that meant some people were wary of crossing its threshold but it was unlikely to put off the kind of person who wielded a samurai sword. Sam Dunbar drank in Munn’s so it was to Munn’s they were going.
They both ordered pints on the basis that it could be a long shift and sitting without alcohol in front of them would send out all sorts of warning signals to the locals. They would think them to be either cops, customs and excise or Christians, and any of those things would mean not being trusted in Munn’s. The pints would be supped slowly, milked for all they were worth, because the last thing that was going to help if they did encounter Dunbar was them being drunk. Everything they knew about him suggested they’d need every ounce of their wits about them.
A hollow-cheeked ned in a blue baseball cap and matching trackies was checking out Winter and Danny from the pool table. He looked like he hadn’t eaten for a month beyond a feast of yum yums or jam doughnuts from Greggs and the odd bag of chips. Being held up by his pool cue and scratching the growth on his cheeks and chin, he seemed to have the idea there was some mileage to be gained from the strangers. He mumbled something to his mate at the table and sidled up to Winter.
‘Awrite, big man? How’s it gaun? Cauld outside, innit?’
‘Aye,’ Winter responded, neither wanting to engage with the junkie or antagonise him. ‘Freezing.’
‘Aye, freezing,’ the ned repeated. ‘Freezing.’
He just stood there, mouth slightly open and eyes somewhere else, waiting for Winter to come back with his contribution to the sparkling conversation. When Winter didn’t oblige, the ned carried on regardless.
‘Game of pool, big man?’
‘Naw, you’re all right.’
‘Gaun, just one game. Play you for a pint.’
‘It’s not my game. Try someone else.’
‘Just for a pint, eh? I’m wasted, like. You’d probably beat me easy.’
Danny put his head forward so it was almost resting on the bar and tilted it so he could look the ned in the eyes.
‘Wee man?’ he growled. ‘Gonnae just piss off, eh? He’s no wanting to play you.’