“No,” she screamed. But the dry hack that coughed from her throat sounded like the voice of someone who was already dead.
GILCHRIST PARKED ONthe pavement.
From the activity around the house he knew they were too late. A SOCO van, with its door open to reveal an array of equipment, sat parked as if abandoned.
He found Dainty in coveralls, phone pressed to his ear. When he saw Gilchrist, he slapped his phone shut.
They gripped hands in grim silence.
Then Dainty said, “Maureen was here. But we’re too late.”
The power to stand almost deserted Gilchrist. “Too late?”
“She’s been moved. We found a shed in the back.”
Gilchrist pushed past, but Dainty gripped his arm.
“It’s not pretty, Andy.”
“I need to see.”
Dainty squeezed his lips together, then said, “Put on your coveralls.”
The back garden looked like a film set. Dragonlights lit the scene like a stage. An unkempt beech hedge pushed branches over a pathway overgrown with weeds. Beyond, a light shone from the open doorway of a wooden building at the bottom of the garden.
Together, they stepped down the pathway. SOCOs shuffled in silence, tagging and bagging. Someone was pouring a milky looking substance onto the ground, making a cast.
“We found a bare footprint.” Dainty pointed. “Over there. The grass is covered in shite. We think it’s human.”
Gilchrist followed in silence. His tongue felt hard, his mouth dry. He stopped on the threshold, gripped the doorframe for support. The stench had him almost backing up.
In the near corner, discarded underwear lay knotted and thick with fecal matter. Close by, a bra, a skirt, a white blouse, dirty and bloodied. But no shoes. Gilchrist ordered his memory to call up an image of Maureen. Was the blouse hers? The skirt, too? But it was useless. He forced himself to analyse the facts as if he was looking at the crime scene of a stranger. He stared at bloodied smears on the floor and walls. Was that Maureen’s blood? A chain fetter lay coiled on the floor, next to a stain that had him gritting his teeth. The chain ran up the wall to an iron ring bolted to the wood near waist height.
Dainty’s voice snapped him back.
“Through here.”
He entered another room, not much larger than the one with the metal shackles. The air was thick enough to taste, a cloying stench of fat and meat that stuck to the tongue, a rich fleshy smell that reminded him of the butcher’s shop on Market Street. A table as thick as a workbench lined one wall. His eyes took in the instruments of torture-the circular saw with its twelve-inch blade that Mackie had calculated, three hacksaws, blades dark with blood or rust. The bench was scarred with a history of cuts and scrapes clogged with dried blood. Bits of flesh or skin lay curled on the clatty surface like tiny scraps, and Gilchrist wondered if they would find slivers of fingernails embedded in the sides. Beneath the table, the floorboards lay stained black. Flies stirred from the mess with a noisy rush.
To his side, dull wooden walls brightened with a display of stapled photographs.
He stepped towards them, felt his breath catch.
He stared at the closest image-Chloe’s white face. Her eyes stared at him with the vacant look of the dead. It took Gilchrist a full second to work out that the slime on her lips was sperm. Another next to it-Chloe on the floor, naked. Breasts as flat as a child’s. Mons veneris lined with a pathetic strip of blonde hair that did little to hide her vagina.
Around her ankles, Gilchrist recognised the shackles.
He peered closer. Was that the toe of a boot?
Closer still. It was.
“There’s two of them,” he said to Dainty.
Dainty pressed in beside him.
Gilchrist pointed at the image. “Can we get an enhancement on that boot?”
“Can do.”
“What do you think, Nance?” he asked, and saw from her tight lips that the worst was yet to come. A glance at Dainty revealed he knew that, too.
Then his eyes settled on a group of six photographs. Even from where he stood, he recognised Maureen. Her bloodied blouse, the abandoned garment in the adjacent room, reflected the glare of the flashlight. Her bare legs looked thinner than he remembered.
“Don’t touch,” Dainty snapped.
Gilchrist had to force himself not to rip the lot from the wall. The photographs could provide clues, could be used as evidence, dusted for prints, analysed for age. But who had taken them? And when? And how long since Maureen had lain chained to the wall?
He tried to study the images with professional detachment. He was a DCI with Fife Constabulary, in charge of a murder investigation. The fact that the victim was known to him should be of no significance, so that his powers of detection remained uninhibited, his sense of reasoning unimpeded, his-
“I’m sorry, Andy.” It was Dainty.
Gilchrist stared at the images the same way he had stared at the images of a hundred dead bodies before. He felt an odd sense of satisfaction that Maureen had been alive at the taking the photographs. But he had seen that red-rimmed look of fear locked in the eyes of too many victims for him to be mistaken. Maureen had known she was going to die.
He felt his lips tighten as he struggled to comprehend the sperm splattered on her forehead, dripping from her chin, creeping into her eyes. He tried to see past that, focus on what any normal detective would. He struggled to reason the facts like an impartial investigator. But it was no use.
He pressed his hand to his mouth, bit down on his knuckles. Tears came at him in gasping sobs, and a fire that he had not felt since he had been bullied with a leather strap at the age of twelve, rose from somewhere deep within him and emerged in a choked curse.
Dainty’s hand squeezed his shoulder.
He shook it off, and thudded from the shed into the cold morning air, past the SOCOs, the flickering camera, the murmuring voices, and strode down the slabbed path.
He was going to have Bully.
He was going to have him with his bare hands.
He was going to tear him limb from limb.
If Maureen’s body was served up to him in bits, he would kill Bully.
By Christ, he promised himself that treat.
Chapter 31
IT TOOK THE realization that Glenorra had to be the key to finding Maureen-it just had to be-to force Gilchrist back to the crime scene.
“Our best guess is that she was taken from here within the last twenty-four hours,” Dainty said to him. “Her underwear may help determine when. We’ll need to run DNA tests. Could you give a blood sample?”
“Of course.”
Dainty nodded.
Gilchrist read the pain in Dainty’s eyes. He knew how Dainty was thinking, how he would feel if it were his own daughter’s life on the line, how he could ask the unanswerable question-how could any father be asked to carry out his professional duties as if the victim was not related to him? It would be too much for Dainty. Gilchrist saw that.
And he saw, too, that it was too much for himself.
He stepped into a kitchen commandeered by Dainty’s team. Muddled voices and the crackle of radio static filled the air. He pushed through an open door into the relative quiet of the hall. He forced himself to concentrate, fight his way back into his investigation. If he had any hope of saving Maureen, he had to think.
Topley. Glenorra. Bully.
Think, God damn it, think.
How were they connected?
Had Chloe visited Glenorra when she dated Kevin Topley? Had she walked along this hallway, stepped into that kitchen? And Maureen, too? She had been at Topley’s party. Had she once stood on this same spot, maybe eyed the same rooms? Had she been here with Chris Topley? Gilchrist looked around him, at cobwebbed cornicing, at a dusty balustrade that led up a staircase of bare floorboards to an upper hallway that seemed to swim with motes of dust. Once-white wallpaper hung from the stairwell in dried strips.