A Deviant Breed (24 page)

***

With everyone up to speed Dunbar got down to some more reading.  Professor Holmquist’s stable isotope tests had revealed where the victims originally hailed from.  No surprise that the skull was a local to the border region of East Lothian.  Had they got that authority to exhume the remains of Archie’s grandfather?  He wrote the question onto his ‘to do’ list.  And victim two originated from coastal Norfolk.  Interestingly though, she had run a sample of his DNA through the genealogy of Scotland database that she had been slowly building and established a match.  Murray’s ancestors were indeed Scots.  Not only that, from the North East.  Amazing how they can do that these days and a tremendous tool for any homicide detective to have in his kit. He wrote another note: ‘Confirm where Kenneth Edward Murray hailed from.’  Yet another boring paper chase for DS Conroy but if it proved fruitful when backed up by the science they could be certain of the victim’s identity.  Holmquist had a theory of course, that despite the science and her genius Murray’s genealogy had little relevance to the case.  His ancestors were probably fish filleters that followed the Scottish herring fleet through the season from Peterhead to England’s south-east coast.  The ports of early to mid twentieth century East Anglia saw the ‘fleet followers’ arrive in droves, and some of them never left.

He had some trawling of his own to do, through the mind-numbing minutiae, but sadly he learned little else that he actually understood.  A copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Science might have been useful.  He looked up and scanned the office, caught Tyler’s eye and waved for her to join him.  She scooped up a copy of the Herald and wandered through.

‘I’ve been thinking, sir –’

‘Good!  That’s one of the qualities I look for in detective inspectors,’ he quipped.

‘About the other night –’

‘Forget it, Ellie has,’ he cut in dismissively.

‘I meant – our wee team sesh.  As the new girl, I gained a lot from the informality of it.  Getting to know the boys a wee bit better over a beer and chat.  I wondered if we should make it a weekly or even a monthly thing.’

He understood perfectly what she meant, but gone were the days of pouring pints and nip chasers down his neck.  In the past it had been de rigueur for every Edinburgh detective.  The city’s pubs were where detectives went for ‘the crack’.  It was part and parcel of the job, whether as a means of strengthening bonds, or simply winding down after a hard day chasing villains or their shadows.  To his certain knowledge Falk and his ilk still did, and good on them, but having the DCI along might cramp their style.  And another thing, he had destroyed one marriage riding that Merry-go-Round, and with age, his capacity for beer had diminished, which was probably a blessing in disguise when he looked at some of his contemporaries.

‘I think you should – sometimes, Briony but –’

‘
But!?
’

‘Bonding and maintaining discipline, there’s a fine balance between the two for any supervisory rank, lass; familiarity breeding contempt, and all that!’

‘I know for a fact that nobody in that office holds you in contempt, sir – on the contrary.  I get the impression that, despite Falk’s faux pas this morning, and the chewing-off he got for it, he would still walk through fire for you and –’

Dunbar knew it too but it was nice to have it reaffirmed. ‘Aye, in the past I’ve locked Monaghan up just for the hell of it – but.’ He eyed her knowingly.

‘You’re a boss now and have to look at the bigger picture’

Dunbar shrugged, then nodded.  ‘I’ve reached that point on the ladder where I spend too much time at one of these.’ He slapped his palm down on the desk top.  ‘And you’ll get there all too soon at the rate you’re going. Worst part of being a boss is that we spend our time telling others what needs to be done and not enough time doing it.’

‘But you do.’ She grinned mischievously, ‘Even with your limp, we’ve done as much legwork on this case as any of team.’

‘Thanks to you,’ he replied. She looked surprised by his response. ‘I was hostile to your appointment but to be honest – I’ve enjoyed having you along.’

‘Because you had to show me the ropes?’  He nodded. ‘And only that?’ She pressed.

He smirked. ‘Couldn’t have someone of a lower rank mentoring you. That would have seriously undermined your credibility.’

What was he getting at? ‘Not feeling all that credible right this minute but, in my defence, I like to think I’ve made my contribution,’ she said.

‘Indeed. What I’m trying to say is – that I miss the cut and thrust, but a DCI, especially an SIO, has to take a step back.  Hell, I’m in danger of turning into Terry Watt, if they ever offer me a crown.  You got me back in the game.’

‘You would have to put on a couple of stone,’ she observed.

‘
Look!
  The team doesnae know you that well yet, so there’s nae harm in letting them get to know you. 
I
, on the other hand, am seen as a high heid – a boss, and I cannae afford to get too familiar with them.’

‘Yes, I understand that, sir, but –’

‘It’s a basic tenet of natural justice that anyone with an axe to grind should not be given dominion over persons cited in a grievance.’

‘What axe to –?’

‘Drink loosens tongues, relaxes attitudes and unleashes demons in some.  I’ve seen drunken DCs take a pop at detective supers’ under the influence of a few pints.  And having put themselves in that situation, to save face, I’ve seen high heids initiate disciplinary proceedings the next day.  Careers ruined, or at best blighted over what was supposed to be a beer and bonding session.  You cannae take personalities out of the equation, Briony.’

‘I don’t imagine you ever doing something like that.’

‘I’d like to think not but – I’ve a fierce temper that has surfaced in drink sometimes.’  Tyler looked genuinely surprised by that admission. ‘Oh aye, I’m nae all sweetness and light, lass –
and
I have to be the last word on this landing.  Lest they go over my heid to the likes o’ Terry Watt or worse, that arsehole, Molineux, an’ I won’t have that.’ She looked a little surprised by his sudden outburst about their commander.  He shrugged it off, ‘
Ach!
I’m no’ saying it won’t happen.  Put this case to bed and we’ll have a blow-out I promise.  But I won’t, I cannot make a habit of it.’

Changing the subject she waved the local rag at him. ‘Have you seen the paper?’

He took it from her, saw the headline and read Ruth the Truth’s sensationalist opening gambit then folded it up again. 

‘Press liaison doing a bang up job as usual. Who’s handling them?’

‘The Chief Super asked for Christina Dean.’

He groaned. ‘Is he shaggin’ her?’ Tyler looked shocked. ‘Well, I mean, the lass is a flake!  Elspeth met her a few years ago at Merchiston Castle School, some pre-graduation careers bash or other, Christina’s an Old Girl but was representing a local PR company at the time.’

‘Elspeth’s alma-mater as well by any chance?’

‘No.  Not even close. Elspeth got to where she is despite her education, not on account o’ it.’

‘Then she is to be admired all the more.’

‘Ach, aye!  I tell ye’, if her star burned any brighter she’d be deemed an alternative energy source.’

Tyler chortled and once again it had a momentary unsettling affect.

‘Christina Dean tapped Elspeth for a job – nae chance!  Anyway Christina’s name came up at a dinner party a while back and I told her she worked for us now.  Elspeth said PL was about right for her.’ Tyler eyed him quizzically. ‘Public liability.’ Tyler snorted. ‘That unfazed act she puts on is just that. Trust me deployment of understatement rarely deceives, and seasoned hacks like Ruth aren’t easily fooled.  They know that the real story lies somewhere in the gap between what is said and what isn’t.  Beats me how she’s held on to her job as long as she has.’

‘Somebody’s got to do it.’

‘If you ask me we’re too fond of press briefings these days.’

‘Ahh but we live in an access-all-areas, media-driven world.  Often as not, the public feel reassured by it and they certainly expect it.’

‘We’re homicide detectives.  We’re not in the business of reassuring the public and shouldn’t.  It lulls them into a false sense of security.  We’re in the business of uncovering the ugly truth.  Speaking of which.’ He checked his dad’s watch, pushed his chair back from his desk and waved an A4 sized document. ‘Let’s go dig up grandpa English.’

15

A church had stood on that spot in one form or other since Malcolm III sat on the throne of Scotland but was almost certainly not dedicated to his youngest son during his rule.  Despite his atheism, Dunbar loved old churches and cathedrals, preferably when there was no service in progress.  He studied the church board and wondered if the sign-writer had ran out of gold paint and left it at St Dabid’s, or simply didn’t fancy tackling the man’s full title.

Despite not being a Gaelic speaker, he had memorised the lineage of Scotland’s monarchs by rote as a schoolboy.  If Dunbar had not chosen law he almost surely would have opted for history and, in that instance, would have eventually specialised in the Scottish medieval period and just as likely, as his daughter does, studied at Dundee.  On occasion, such as now, when his job forced him to explore the iniquities of violent and abhorrent crimes, he sometimes wished he had taken that academic path.

The Kirk of St Dabíd I (St David I) in Bentock, ‘Dabid mac Maíl Choluim’ to give him his true patronymic, although in need of more than a little TLC, was quaint and the shabbiness somehow added to its rustic charm.  In its present form it had survived fairly unchanged since the late seventeenth century apart from having electricity installed – and a tungsten padlock and chain on the door; since the bell that had tolled for four hundred years was stolen in the late 90s; to sell for scrap no doubt.

As Dunbar and Tyler waited for the others to arrive, he wandered around its decrepit dry-stone walled perimeter admiring the views.  Every so often he would stop to read a headstone and wonder what silent, unspoken secrets had been taken to that particular grave.  We all have them.  No silence today though.  The persistent cack of rooks provided the chorus for the solo caw of a carrion crow perched on the weather vane, in turn accompanied by the hiss of a thin but resentful wind through the Yew Trees. Taken together, an ominous soundtrack to the grisly duty they were about to undertake. Briony Tyler sidled up alongside him.

‘Welcome or omen, Inspector?’ he asked, shielding his eyes to look skyward.  Before she could answer, the guttural rumble of a tractor and clanking of chains on metal caught both their attentions.  It also brought the team minister outside there being no resident clergy any more of course. 

The nearby manse had been sold off in 2006, to a retired couple from Lancashire.  The minister looked uneasy.  Her lips still moved but no sound emanated.  Offering prayers on behalf of the man they were about to dig up, he wondered.  It hardly seemed right.  Praying for the departed soul of a man,
who
– according to the DNA evidence had sexually abused his own daughter and got her pregnant, but of course they were keeping that detail under their hats for now.  Only Dunbar’s team, Donnie Salkeld and Professor Holmquist were privy to that information, possibly Geary and Vasquez as well.  If Dunbar had been inclined to pray – it would have been for no more surprises.

***

The ground around the Kirk bulged with centuries of the dead.  According to the minister, Fraser and Alice English had been the last people so granted the honour.  It had no doubt been Fraser English’s influence within the diocese that had secured their hallowed place; lain to rest, side-by-side, under a shared headstone in a shade of an ancient Yew. 

In 1978, the adjoining paddock, where many years earlier the incumbent minister’s pony would have grazed, had been consecrated to accommodate the deceased from the three parishes of Bentock, Spinney Burn and Lowford.  According to the minister, the English family plot had been reserved long before it was needed.  There remained still a space originally intended for their daughter, Morag, but now reserved in the name of Archibald Fraser English. 

The epitaph on the headstone read:
Pure of soul,
pure of heart, rest eternal, never to part
.  Dunbar imagined a right unholy row had been going since the old degenerate’s wife reached the Pearly Gates and asked for a phone and a direct line to perdition.

The gravedigger was a broad-backed farm labourer from Lowford called Bruce Dougan, who was rather unimaginatively known as Digger by all about according to the minister.  Mercifully for him, his employer had granted him use of the farm’s mini-digger, provided the diocese paid for the diesel of course.  But with forearms like hams to go with that broad back, he looked like a man who could shift soil as efficiently as any machine.

Rocking on his heels, as if testing the underlay of a carpet, Digger announced, ‘I can tell ye’ tha’ noo – this grounds bin messed with.’  He pecked at it with the toe of his safety-boots and raked the surface of the slightly overgrown plot with his heel before going to work.  ‘Aye, turf weren’t cut reet afore it was dug, see – a canny mess it is too. 
Ach!
  I know folk that would kill te get a plot in the precincts o’ the kirk.’

‘Who says they haven’t already?’ Dunbar quipped.

Digger eyed the DCI suspiciously.

‘Messed with recently?’ Tyler asked.

Digger shook his head, ‘Nae lass, not these past couple o’ months at least, but more than that, I’d nae like te say.’  He looked it over again and turned to her.  ‘But I can tell ye this – I’ve never left a grave in as sorry a state as this.  Take a look in’t cemetery if ye dinnae believe me.  Take pride in my work!  Nothin’ less than the deceased deserve.’

‘Amen to that,’ the trendy minister said.  Dunbar wondered what odds he would have got on her appointment being vetoed if old Fraser English had still held sway in the parish.  He could not imagine him approving of women preachers, especially ones with a spiky and boyishly short purple rinse and ‘Ban the Bomb’ symbol earrings.

‘Ye could play bowls on’t turf after I’ve back-filled a plot,’ Digger bragged, as he plonked his bulk down on the machine’s seat. The minister nodded her agreement and said something that was drowned out by the metallic clatter as the bucket’s teeth dug into the ground.

Dunbar had been fully expecting an indignant Archie English to turn up.  He had opposed the exhumation, in a predictably confusing wordy letter to the authorities, without resorting to a legal challenge; which in itself was interesting, if not altogether unexpected.  Was there more to his protest than the understandable distress of having one’s loved ones final resting place disturbed?  As far as Alec Dunbar could tell, Archie was a man with the emotional range of a tea-bag so there had to be something else driving his objections, and why had he not sought legal advice?  Too stupid?  Too tight fisted?  Was he simply acting out his part in the unfolding drama his discovery at Braur Glen had initiated?  Making sure his name also appeared in the annals of the bureaucracy these events always generate, as well as in the investigations of both archaeologists and police alike?

The gist of his missive was to place on record his objection as sole heir to the English estate.  That would be the modest annuity his grandparents left and a small mortgage-free terraced cottage then.  After that it dissolved into a confused diatribe about honouring the family name and disrespecting the solemnity of his devout grandparents’ final resting place.  Reading between the lines, it was all about Archie.    None of this would be happening but for his discovery at Braur Glen.  Look-At-Me or LAM syndrome, as Dunbar called it.

Archie was certainly revelling in the press attention.  Getting his face in the paper had been a tremendous thrill and Dunbar suspected that he had become a prime source for Ruth the Truth.  He also wondered how long it would be before she began to regret giving Archie her card.  Tyler already had; Archie was hardly ever off the phone to her, leaving voicemails and texts enquiring as to how the investigation is progressing.  Archie might explain the probing questions Ruth kept wrong-footing the hapless press-officer Christina Dean with, but that was not terribly difficult to do, with or without insider relevant information.  Ruth’s questions though were framed in such a way that suggested to Dunbar that she had another source; one within his precincts.

He had been meaning to have a quiet ‘off-the-record’ word with Ruth.  The enquiry had reached a sensitive stage, and the last thing he needed was a member of the press giving his quarry a heads-up by splashing across the front page a detail only the killer and police would know.  He really should make a point of gagging her but somehow could not seem to find time in his schedule to track her down. 

As he watched the bucket of the digger inch nearer with incredible precision, Dunbar began to dread what they might find.  If the body in the casket still had its head, what then?  He could do without another twist to an already complex case and yet more expensive DNA tests.  They had yet to challenge Archie over the DNA comparison that proved the skull was that of his father and grandfather.   It was a card he would rather not play until they had cause to interview him under caution and get his responses down on tape, and a lot closer to charging somebody for Wilson Farish’s murder.  Nor could he trust that Archie would not go and blurt that information to Ruth the Truth.  For all Dunbar knew, whatever was or was not in that grave might not come as a surprise to Archie.

Digger eventually abandoned the machine after reaching a depth of around four and a half feet.  Not wanting to damage the casket, he jumped into the hole with a shovel and put that strong back and those impressive forearms to work.  Within seconds Dunbar had to call a halt when Digger’s shovel thudded into something soft.  The gravedigger scraped at the soil some more and exposed what looked like shirt material and a telltale smell immediately filled the air.  Digger looked up at Dunbar with a sickly expression.  The DCI nodded and gestured for him to continue.  Digger reversed his shovel and raked off a little more soil with the blade, yelped, cursed and bolted from the grave.

The added twist Dunbar had feared had materialised. A headless corpse lay on top of Fraser English’s coffin. The exhumation would have to be completed by Eugene and Laughing Boy, who had been on standby to take over once the casket lid was exposed.

‘You weren’t kidding about always getting the weird ones, were you?’ Tyler said softly, before turning away..

***

What should have been a fairly quick procedure now threatened to take up the rest of the day, so Dunbar left Tyler in charge, who was not best pleased.  Not because she had been lumbered with supervising a potentially critical evidence gathering exercise. 
That
promised to be fascinating.  No, the source of her displeasure was the idea of hitching a ride back with E-BeeGeeBee.  His almost manic intensity, lack of humour and holier-than-thou sermonising freaked her out.  According to her, bar the paedophilia, he would have got along very well with Archie’s grandpa and Dunbar could only agree.

Meanwhile he headed back to Edinburgh and an unusually frosty reception from Detective Superintendent Terry Watt.

‘Ahh, y’er back I see,’ Watt had said, when they met in the foyer.  ‘Perfect timing, Alec – it’s almost as if you knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘That Adrian Moody’s on his way to Holyrood to be anointed by Minto Almighty,’ he hissed, bitterly.

‘Like I said – horses for courses.’

‘Aye, that ye did – who else did ye say it to though?  That’s the burning question around Fettes Avenue, Alec mon.’

‘Just figure of speech, never given it a thought since that meeting.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, sir – but I’ve been fairly busy.’

‘But not so busy you couldn’t leave an inexperienced subordinate to supervise things down at Bentock.’

‘It doesn’t take Sherlock bloody Holmes to oversee the continuity of evidence gathering from a hole in the ground, sir.  And you know how Eugene hates having me breathing down his neck.’

‘SCHU was oor baby, Alec, we –’ he whined, looking around.

‘
Ours!?
’ Dunbar interrupted.  ‘If memory serves I was the last in line when the music stopped in a game of pass-the-parcel.’

‘Is that so? 
Well!
  Away an’ claim yer’ prize then.’

Dunbar checked his temper.  ‘It didn’t even have a decent acronym when you dumped it into my in-tray, sir!’

Terry Watt bristled.  ‘We presented the protocols.’

‘Well, it looks like
we
did a good job of selling it, because appointing Adrian Moody means it’s got the green light.’

‘But we did the all the donkey work –’

‘
We!?
’ he repeated, still miffed that Watt had made no contribution whatsoever and yet had stolen the greater part of the glory.

‘– the administrative and operational standing orders,’ Watt continued, ignoring his interruption.  ‘And Strathclyde’s Deputy Chief gets the director’s job.’ 

It made perfect sense to Alec Dunbar.  From the outset it was the director’s position with the new Serious Crime and Homicide Unit that was always destined to go to an officer of that rank.  Their own former Deputy Chief Constable had very little CID experience and might have been better advised not to apply in the first place.  Furthermore, having dispensed with so many senior posts already since the amalgamation, it was highly unlikely that they would promote someone into the post and so Adrian Moody struck him as an obvious choice.

‘Been doing a wee bit o’ lobbyin’ on the QT have ye?’  Watt asked, with a sly look in his eye.

‘No!’