Driftnet (2 page)

‘Alright
then?’

‘Yes.’ Rhona
began to pack her samples in the case.

‘The Sergeant
will run you home.’

He walked with
her to the front door.

‘How’s that
Irishman of yours these days? Still playing at the club?’

‘Yes he
is.’

‘Must get down
and hear him again soon. Good jazz player. You’ll ring me as soon
as you’ve got anything?’

‘Of
course.’

Sean was still
asleep when Rhona got back. With the heavy curtains drawn the room
was dark, although outside dawn was already touching the university
rooftops. She had stopped at the lab on her way home and checked
the swabs for saliva. It was there alright.

She left a note
on the bench for Chrissy in case she got there first, giving her a
brief history of the night’s events, then she headed home for a few
hours sleep.

Rhona pulled
her dress over her head, kicked off her shoes and slid under the
duvet. She wrapped her chilled body round Sean’s. He grunted and
moved his arm over to take her hand.

‘Okay?’ he
mumbled.

‘Okay,’ she
said, but he was already back asleep.

Rhona closed
her eyes and tried to relax into his warmth. She had been at many
murder scenes, some more horrible than the one tonight. Death
didn’t scare her, not when it was reduced to tests and samples. But
tonight was different. There was something about that particular
boy. Something she hadn’t been able to put her finger on. Not until
the Sergeant had put it into words for her, coming back in the
car.

The boy who had
been abused and strangled in that hideous little room looked so
like her, he could have been her brother.

Chapter 3

When she got to
the lab the next morning, there was a delicious smell of fresh
coffee. Someone had been to the Deli, because there were two
croissants on a plate next to the coffee machine.

‘So you finally
decided to come in?’ Chrissy’s red head appeared round the door of
the cupboard. ‘Thought I was going to have to do all the work
myself.’

‘You got my
note?’

‘I found it,’
said Chrissy grimly. ‘The samples you brought back are logged and
the bags of clothing and bedclothes arrived about half an hour ago.
Coffee?’ She headed for the coffee machine, without waiting for an
answer. ‘I thought lover boy made the breakfast in the morning,’
she said as she poured two mugs.

‘I made him
stay in bed. It was too early for sane people to be up.’

‘You have a man
who thinks it’s his job to make the breakfast and you stop him
doing it.’ Chrissy shook her head in disbelief. ‘Try getting one of
my brothers to do anything in the kitchen.’

‘What about
Patrick?’

‘Patrick was
different,’ she said flatly. ‘That’s why he left.’

They sat at the
lab table, Rhona nursing her coffee while Chrissy made some notes
on what was to be done. Rhona had already filled in the background,
at least the stuff Chrissy needed to know. She didn’t know why she
was always so careful of Chrissy’s feelings. She might be young but
she’d seen plenty in her life, if her tales of her brothers were
anything to go by.

Chrissy looked
up from her list. ‘We’re going to be pushed to do all this with
Tony away.’

‘Unless they
draft in some help, we’ll just have to put the regular work on
hold. Murder has priority.’ Rhona said.

‘They never
gave us any help for the last one.’ Chrissy’s voice was wearily
resigned. ‘Have they any idea who the boy was, or do we have to
identify him as well?’

Rhona shook her
head. ‘He had no ID. on him. We’ll profile him on what we have and
see what Bill comes up with.’

‘I’ll start on
the clothing then?’ Chrissy said, resigned.

Rhona nodded.
‘The cover looks as though it has been used before. I circled areas
to be tested.’

‘Semen?’

‘Probably. Oh
and there was a smell in the room.’

’I bet there
was!’

‘No. I mean a
nice smell. Like a man’s cologne. Subtle, probably expensive.’

‘Definitely not
Brut then?’

‘Definitely not
your average aftershave. It’s a long shot, but maybe there’s some
on the boy’s tee-shirt or that cover.’

‘There was
plenty of blood.’

‘Yes.’ Rhona
wasn’t going to elaborate.

‘It’s okay. The
photos arrived first thing. I‘ve already had a look. Poor guy. Nice
looking too.’

She gave Rhona
an odd stare. Rhona remembered what the Sergeant had said the night
before. But if that was what Chrissy was thinking, she didn’t say
it.

‘That’s the
problem nowadays, all the nice looking ones are gay,’ Chrissy
grinned. ‘Except your Sean, of course.’

‘If you could
stop thinking about Sean, we could get started.’

Rhona was
trying to pull rank but it was water off a duck’s back. Her
Scientific Officer gave her a look that said, ‘So you didn’t get it
last night.’

‘By the way.
There was a phone call for you, Rhona. A bloke. Sounded sexy.
Wouldn’t give his name. Just said he’d try later.’

Death always
involved relationships. Death because they loved you. Death because
they didn’t. Death because no one loved them. Love and hate. Hate
and love.

And what about
this death? Why had the boy died? It looked as though he had come
to the room for sex. There was no sign of a struggle, not until the
noose had tightened round his neck and even then, only when the
perpetrator had gone too far.

Dr Sissons had
phoned. Death was by asphyxiation during anal sex, he said. The
ligature had probably been used to restrict oxygen to the brain to
promote orgasm.

‘The death
wasn’t premeditated then?’ Rhona asked.

‘There’s some
evidence to suggest the boy has been involved in such an activity
before. Earlier bruises in the same area, though less pronounced.
There was probably a pad placed between the ligature and the
neck.’

‘But not this
time?’

‘No. This time,
the ligature was tightened to unconsciousness and beyond and
whatever the boy agreed to do, I can’t believe he wanted to
die.’

‘And the
mutilation?’

‘After death
definitely and probably by biting. The gash on the penis is
elliptical. I took the liberty of calling in the Odontology Unit.
Hope that’s okay?’

Dr Sissons
liked to believe there was rivalry between the various forensic
departments. Even if there was, Rhona wasn’t going to encourage
him.

‘I located
saliva on the nipples and the shoulder,’ she said.

‘Good. There
was also semen on the anal swab. What about the curtain?’

‘We’re working
on that. It looks as though it’s been used more than once. We’ll
take our time and go over all of it. There might be fibres or old
blood,’ Rhona said. ‘Oh, and I combed two head hairs from the pubic
region.’

‘Not the
boy’s?’

‘I’ve still to
check, but one’s dark, so it’s unlikely, Rhona paused. ‘I take it
you don’t know who the boy is yet?’

‘No. The post
mortem suggests he was in his late teens, say between sixteen and
twenty. Good health, although he’s had his appendix removed. No
evidence of drug abuse. Non smoker. Well nourished. Your forensic
biologists are enjoying the dubious pleasure of examining his
stomach contents, so we’ll know soon what he’d been eating before
he died. With a bit of luck it will be curry and the police can
start checking all the Glasgow curry houses to see if they
recognise him. And Dr MacLeod?’ Dr Sissons voice was
thoughtful.

‘Yes?’

‘You aren’t
missing a member of your family are you? The boy bore an uncanny
resemblance to you.’

Rhona assured
him that as far as she knew, her family was fully accounted for and
rang off.

Rhona lifted
her head from the microscope. A smirr of rain was touching the
window, but here and there the sun was breaking through the cloudy
skies. The park below the laboratory was quiet, just a few mums and
kids at the swings and a couple walking, arm in arm. As she
watched, the boy stopped beside a clump of trees, bent down and
picked a bluebell and handed it to the girl. They began to
kiss.

Six months
before, Rhona had stepped over another yellow tape just where the
couple were standing now. It had turned out to be a student from
the University, murdered on his way home from a dance at the
Student’s Union. Last night’s murder, she thought, made four in one
year. All young men.

The first two
had been violent assaults with no evidence of sexual activity, but
the one in the park had been different. It had all the hallmarks of
queer bashing. The student was gay and was in a known cruising
area. His chest and arms were covered with kick marks and his head
had been caved in by a blunt instrument, which was never found.
Rhona’s team had scoured the area for traces of the killer - or
killers. It had been useless. Heavy overnight rain had washed the
place clean of clues.

One thing
connected that murder to this one. The victim had been wearing a
thin leather neck band with a Celtic cross on it. At the post
mortem the pathologist had found bruising round the neck,
synonymous with the neck band being pulled during the assault. What
if tightening the neck band had been part of a violent sexual
assault?

When Sean found
out what her job was, he had laughingly called her Lady Death.
Rhona didn’t care. She loved her work. She loved the functions and
the structures and the painstaking carefulness of it all. She had
forsaken medicine because she found it too depressing. So many sick
people and, if she was honest, so little she could do to help them.
Forensic Science was different. Here she could help, as long as she
was prepared to look for the truth. That was the fascination. The
truth hid from her, until she found just the right question to ask.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t what had happened but why it had
happened that held the truth.

Maybe that’s
why we couldn’t find the killer, she thought. Maybe we got the
‘why’ bit of the jigsaw wrong.

Rhona wiped her
breath from the window pane. The couple had moved off towards the
Art Gallery and were climbing the steps to get under the ornate
portico, out of the rain. Rhona went back to the microscope, not
wanting to think about the Art Gallery. Not since last Friday when
she’d taken her lunch there and spotted the familiar long blue
raincoat and dark hair.

She tried to
concentrate on the next slide, ignoring the knot in her
stomach.

‘Fancy coming
out for some lunch?’ Chrissy was standing in the doorway.

Rhona shook her
head.

‘Right. I’ll
bring you back a sandwich then.’ Chrissy wasn’t asking. She was
telling. It was like having your mother working for you.

Rhona leaned
forward and watched Chrissy emerge below. A bloke on the other side
of the street crossed over to meet her, his shaved head bowed and
his hands in his pockets. It looked as if Chrissy was giving him a
right mouthful. He would be either the latest in a long line of
boyfriends, she thought, or else one of Chrissy’s brothers here to
borrow money from the only member of the family who was in a job, a
legitimate one anyway.

Bill Wilson
phoned her halfway through the afternoon and asked her how things
were going. She told him what she’d told Dr Sissons.

‘I’m working on
the hairs just now’, she said. ‘It’ll take us a while to examine
the cover thoroughly, but you can have the whisky glasses back’,
she added, ‘I’ve finished with them.’

‘Thanks,
although I don’t hold out much hope of finding our suspect’s prints
on file.’ Bill sounded resigned. ‘By the way, the story’s splashed
all over the evening paper.’

‘Right.’

She heard a
short ‘Mmm’ of displeasure.‘If anyone pesters you for info?’

‘I don’t have
any. Oh and Bill,’ she stopped him before the phone went down.
‘Were you right?’ she asked.

‘About
what?’

‘The English
connection.’

‘We haven’t
found out who the boy was or where he came from. But you can read
that in the Evening Post. They always know more than us
anyway.’

Rhona stopped
work at five o’clock. Her eyes were tired from peering down the
microscope and the lunchtime sandwich had long since been eaten.
Chrissy had left at four, pleading a ‘domestic’ to sort out. One
look at Chrissy’s face convinced Rhona not to ask any
questions.

Now, all she
wanted was something substantial to eat and a long hot soak in the
bath. She started to tidy the lab, methodically filing away her
notes and locking the filing cabinet. She stored the samples and
switched on the ansaphone.

Outside, the
rain had moved off north towards the Campsie Hills. The sky had
cleared to a dull blue. She was a twenty minute walk from the flat
and as long as the evening was fine there was no point in taking a
bus. It would just sit at the traffic lights anyway. She headed for
Byres Road.

She knew Sean
would have already bought something for tea but she stopped at the
pasta shop anyway. Mr Margiotta welcomed her with his usual patter
and persuaded her to try the spinach and ricotta cannelloni, adding
an extra dollop of tomato and basil sauce for good measure.

‘Love food,’ he
promised with a wicked grin.

Just what she
didn’t need.

Rhona allowed
herself five minutes to decide what she was going to do, before she
put her key in the lock. Part of her wished she could just forget
what she’d seen in the Art Gallery, but it was like a forensic clue
and she couldn’t let it go. Like one of those semen samples. She
had to know whose it was.

When she opened
the door of the flat she was greeted by the rich scent of garlic
and olive oil.

‘Hi,’ Sean
called from the kitchen. He was chopping vegetables next to the
cooker. He turned and smiled at her, wiping his hands on a tea
towel. ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Coffee? A drink?’