He woke with a start when he realised it was the phone ringing and dived across the bed as Rachel rolled over threatening to wake up. The first instinct on being phoned at this time was to wonder if someone had died. In this case they had.
“What the absolute fuck?” he asked in an outraged half-whisper before apologising to the despatcher on the end of the phone while she fumbled around wondering whether to respond to this particular question or not.
He set the espresso machine off to make a triple while he staggered around trying to wedge himself into a pair of ever tightening jeans and narrowly missed smacking his head on one of the thick posts at the foot of the bed. He wondered if it was inappropriate, wearing a Thundercats t-shirt, albeit under a hooded top and a three quarter length jacket.
The body had been found by revellers staggering home around an hour ago, left out in the open on waste ground.
Western harbour had been built in the early 2000s in an effort to cash in on Leith’s up and coming status as the new place to be and develop the waterfront by ramming it full of glass and concrete. Unfortunately it seemed Leith was still up and coming and many of the flats were starting to look less than the stylish contemporary living spaces the estate agents liked to brand them.
A recession and stalling recovery meant there was plenty of waste ground in the area and a surplus of now cheap accommodation readily available to whoever.
Dr Brown had the honour of being on call again this morning and looked like he was somewhere else.
The body lay face down on the broken concrete. From what Burke could see he was black, twenty-five to thirty-ish, tall, well-built and recently the victim of a fairly brutal strangling. The neck had a deep open wound running round its full circumference. Blood had congealed as it ran down the victim’s hooded top but notably not onto the concrete.
“As you can no doubt see he’s been moved some time after death,” the Doctor said, confirming Burke’s suspicion. “Not that they’ve been overly concerned about hiding him.”
“I’m starting to think bodies are like buses,” Burke said, trying to get a closer look at the face. “That’s a fairly serious cut.”
“My guess would be some form of garrotte,” the Doctor replied. “Something like cheese wire.”
“Must’ve stung a bit.”
“Possibly not that much depending on how quickly they severed the carotid artery. More likely he bled to death than suffocated.”
“Happy days. Any idea as to the time of death?”
“Not more than three hours. A bit fresher than yesterday’s effort.”
“You can say that again. Busy couple of days for you.”
“Well it is the funeral season.”
He made his way back to Gayfield Square, placed his head on folded arms and fell into unconsciousness for a solid hour.
The cold woke him. He made another coffee and turned on his PC. He googled garrotting and was immediately given the dictionary definition along with a Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject and a series of black ink illustrations in the images section, their period indicating it was not exactly a popular pastime of late. Wikipedia seemed to think it was primarily an assassination weapon although it had been favoured by the Spaniards as an execution method for around seven hundred years or so. The Inquisition naturally featured in many of the illustrations.
He found himself wondering about mechanics of it all; how it was possible to do that sort of damage to a neck without inadvertently severing a couple of your own fingers using cheese wire? You would probably have to wear gloves. Maybe that pointed to something professional. He knew from experience it was possible to slice up your fingers just trying to snap a piece of thread, though truth be told he knew from experience it was possible to do many seemingly innocuous things and injure yourself through sheer pathological clumsiness, like the time he’d stepped off a boat, forgetting it hadn’t yet docked and got up close and personal with the Irish Sea.
He couldn’t find links to any particular organised crime persuasion that liked to use this method of dispatch but found a BBC news article about a study finding strangling was not usually linked to organised crime. No joy. He knocked his head slowly on the desk and then something caught his eye. He looked up to see a concerned looking DC Jones looking at him. She was back.
“You ok boss?” she asked.
“Fine,” he replied, unsure if you should invent some kind of reason or justification for effectively drumming your head of a desk -trying to get the circulation going on a cold morning maybe- and drawing a blank. “You?”
“Good thanks, yeah,” she replied dumping a bag of what seemed to be everything on the floor and arranging an array of Danish pastries on her desk. She should really be fat he thought before remembering that people had said the same about him five years ago. They never appreciated their metabolic rate, the youth of the day.
He watched out of the corner of his eye as she rearranged her desk, trying to marshal the brightly coloured picture frames and stationary into some kind of order before her day officially began, like some kind of modern superstition or maybe just a slight case of OCD. He himself had never been able to find a happy organisational medium and tended to go through phases at both ends of the spectrum, though as he grew longer in the tooth he suspected the slobby chaotic end of the spectrum was starting to look more like home.
She was young and keen, still having the idea she could make a difference, not yet at the stage where she would become jaded. That came with time, along with the cynicism and the sensation of swimming through treacle.
Slowly the office began to fill up and he felt like a little normality had resumed. The routine of this place, if nothing else, was a kind of constant, as much as it could be in this job.
He’d arranged a briefing for nine thirty regarding yesterday’s bag of fun and would at least enjoy seeing their faces on breaking this latest development. Not that he had any reason to suspect they were connected.
He commandeered a copy of The Metro in an effort to check the latest which was of course not a lot. Snow was still predicted and a debate raged as to whether this time the authorities were prepared. Ah the excitement. Why was it that these days he seemed to find everything the media said like some kind of Chinese water torture? It was always the same thing; over and over, repeat, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
He wanted a break. Or did he? He wasn’t sure he knew what he wanted anymore.
They convened in a meeting room, the temperature of which was always the subject of a debate but which was a welcome relief from the dose of the shivers he seemed to have acquired.
Things started well enough, though there wasn’t a lot to go on the team were keen to get their teeth into this one.
It seemed no one had seen anything of the bag prior to the discovery of its decomposing contents.
“Any joy with CCTV?”
“None boss,” DC Quinn replied in his thick Glaswegian accent. “There are obviously cameras on the roads either side and at the schools and HQ but none that actually focus on what’s happening on the street itself.”
“Any way we could spot if anything took longer than expected from one end to the other?” Burke asked, knowing as he did that there was an additional problem.
“I’d wondered that myself,” Quinn answered. “Problem is there’s a lot of parking there so there’s a potential for everything to be mis-timed. Someone parks for a bit, someone else dithers looking for a spot, that kind of thing.”
“Joggers? Cyclists?”
“Plenty but no-one with a sports bag like that, although most of them had rucksacks, commuters running to work that kind of thing.”