Open Season (Bob Skinner), page 12
He stepped aside to allow Grace access to the bones. She leaned over, peering at the hands. ‘So it would seem,’ she murmured, moving along to the head. ‘Has everyone taken all the photographs and video you’ll need?’ she asked. ‘Can I disturb the remains?
Both the detective and the scientist nodded.
She picked up the skull and examined it closely. ‘Smaller than the other,’ she said, ‘and far less pristine. The first one had perfect teeth. This one did not. This one will have left a dental record behind somewhere.’ She turned the relic carefully in both hands. ‘I’m looking at two major depressed fractures here at the back of the head,’ she said. ‘Without prejudicing a detailed examination, if either of these injuries were sustained pre-mortem, they would have proved fatal. Since care appears to have been taken over the burial, I’d say they did not happen after death. This person’s head was smashed in.’ She put the skull back in place and moved to the centre of the excavation, straddling it, a foot on either side. ‘Correction,’ she announced. ‘This woman’s head was smashed in. The pelvis is definitely female, and looking at the width I’d say it’s likely that she had given birth.’
‘How soon before death might she have done that?’
‘No way could I tell you that, I’m afraid.’ She stood and stepped across the grave to re-join McClair. ‘Detective Inspector, you’ve got a double murder on your hands. I can only hope we don’t find a tiny skeleton down there to make it a threesome.’
Thirty-Nine
‘Is the meeting with Houseman set?’ Xavi Aislado asked.
Skinner nodded. ‘Yes. I’ve spoken to his boss the director general, Dame Amanda Dennis. She and I go back decades. She’s mildly pissed off at me for trying to recruit one of her best, but as I thought, she’s not going to stand in his way if he wants to leave. If you’re okay with it, I thought we could fly him from Heathrow to Barcelona on Thursday morning, and have him brought straight here. Depending on how the pair of you get on he could either catch an evening flight back, or stay over for an extra day, to let him see your daily routine.’
‘I’m fine with all that, Bob,’ Aislado said. ‘Yes, let’s fly Houseman out on Thursday, but there’s one other person who needs to be involved: my daughter. He’s going to be minding Paloma as well when she’s with me, so she must have a say. The company plane will pick her up at Biggin Hill tomorrow. I’ve checked that she can take a couple of days off college; if we all get on and Houseman can stay that long, maybe they can both go back on Saturday or Sunday on the Gulfstream. I’ve been thinking that if it works out he could use Joe’s old suite. It’s self-contained, with everything he’ll need, but it’s part of the main house, so instant access in an emergency.’
‘Yes, that’ll be ideal,’ Skinner agreed. ‘I’ll go ahead and tell Girona to set up the travel plans.’
‘Will you be here for the meeting?’ Aislado asked. ‘Or will you have gone back to Edinburgh by then?’
‘I’ll still be in Spain, but I shouldn’t be at the interview. You need to form your own impressions of each other with no nods or winks from me.’
‘Will I like him?’
‘What did I just say, Xavi?’
‘Fair enough,’ Aislado chuckled.
‘Before I leave to make all this happen,’ Skinner said. ‘I need to update you on that text you had. It was a French number, but it might as well have been Spanish. It was a disposable SIM bought in Perpignan.’
‘Does your police contact know where the phone is now?’
‘It won’t be anywhere. They don’t call these things burners for nothing. Let’s just focus on the content of the message. We’re agreed that the sender must have read your commissioned biography, The Loner, to have come up with those coordinates. You told me that the book had a very limited circulation, but is there anyone else you gave a copy to that you haven’t told me about?’
Aislado’s great forehead wrinkled into a frown. ‘I think I mentioned everyone,’ he murmured, almost to himself. ‘Close friends and colleagues. Family. That’s it. Except . . . Tommy. Did I mention Tommy Partridge, June and Nanette’s dad? My stepfather? I wasn’t going to give him a copy in case he showed it to my mother, but in the end I did, when he promised that he wouldn’t. That’s all, but no way did he send that message. Last time I heard from him he told me he had congestive lung disease and wasn’t going any further than the paper shop. No, whoever else it was, it wasn’t him.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Skinner said. ‘I’ll have a word with him when I get back to Scotland. Meanwhile . . .’
He broke off as his phone alerted him to an incoming message. He took it out and peered at the screen. It displayed a UK number. He clicked. His eyes widened and an incredulous smile spread across his face.
‘Fuck me,’ he whispered. ‘It’s my turn. I’ve had a mystery text.’
‘What does it say?’ Xavi asked.
‘Two words. “How’s Sunny?” That’s all.’
‘Who’s Sunny?’
‘Sunny’s my dog,’ Skinner replied. ‘Or rather he’s the dog I adopted when Matthew Reid disappeared. If that man is still out there, he really is pushing his luck! Xavi, as soon as the arrangements are in place for the Houseman meeting, I’m heading north.’
Forty
‘Does that mean we go back to the beginning?’ Jackie Wright asked. ‘Do everything we’ve done in vain for the first skeleton, but looking for a female victim this time?’
‘This time we wait,’ Noele McClair replied. ‘Let’s hold off doing anything until we know for sure that we have one inquiry. The removal of the fingertips on both sets of remains points in that direction, but it’s an obvious precaution against a body being unearthed. Let’s face it, if you’re a killer and you aren’t bothered about your victims being discovered and identified, are you going to bother burying them?’
‘Come on, boss,’ the DS protested. ‘Two different people burying two different murder victims in the same location? How likely is that? Of course it’s a single investigation.’
‘No, it isn’t, not until the evidence says it is. I don’t deal in assumptions, and neither, last time I checked, does the procurator fiscal. Jackie, I’d like you to rescue Tiggy from the newspaper trawl, then get back to the Tayside Police archives and look for missing females.’
‘Starting when? The second victim wasn’t under a tree; she could be much more recent than the first.’
‘See? We can’t say that it’s a single investigation.’
‘Two words,’ the combative sergeant replied. ‘“Serial” and “killer”.’
‘It may be so, and we may have to keep the body-sniffing dogs here for a month. For now, do as I ask. Start with twenty years ago and work backwards. I can’t help thinking you’ll get a result. Guys can just bugger off and nobody cares, but missing females tend to be treated more seriously.’
‘All right.’ She grinned. ‘Coffee for the road?’
‘Get to—’
The retort was cut short by her ring tone. ‘Number withheld,’ her screen told her as she took the call. ‘McClair.’
‘Detective Inspector,’ the caller said. ‘Arthur Dorward. I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten you.’
‘That was beginning to cross my mind,’ she admitted.
‘No chance. Getting a match for your first victim’s DNA took longer than I had hoped, but we’ve got there . . . up to a point,’ he added after a pause. ‘It’s not direct, in that we haven’t found him, but it looks like we’ve tracked down his father. We’ve got a fifty per cent match with a man called Moses Aaron Trott, whose genetic profile’s on the police database after he was convicted twenty-one years ago of the culpable homicide of his next-door neighbour. I looked at the summary of the investigation. Trott was playing Metallica full volume on his stereo. The woman complained so he killed her, just like that, pulped her head with a baseball bat. The charge was murder, but for a reason that I can’t imagine, the advocate depute accepted a plea bargain, guilty to culpable homicide. I can only assume that the judge was a Black Sabbath fan or, even worse, that she didn’t like heavy metal at all, because she sentenced him to life with a minimum tariff of fourteen years. He couldn’t have impressed the parole board because he was only released on licence three years ago, meaning he served eighteen. The address where the crime was committed is eighty-one Arbroath Wynd, Dundee. The rest is over to you, Noele, but be careful, this does not sound like a nice man at all. You might want to take your big Sikh sergeant with you when you go to break the news.’
‘Thanks, Arthur,’ she said. ‘Tarvil Singh’s otherwise engaged with Covid, but I’d back Jackie Wright and her extendable baton against most seventy-year-olds. Given that his son’s been underground for thirty years, he’s got to be that age at least.’
‘You’re right,’ Dorward acknowledged. ‘I’m just looking at his file. The guy’s seventy-seven. By the way, my son tells me you’ve got another sample heading to the lab. I’ll expedite that when it gets here, but we’re not finished with the first one. There’s other places we can look, and we’re in the process of doing that.’
‘Arthur,’ McClair exclaimed, ‘you’ve re-energised a couple of tired detectives. Thanks for that. Jackie,’ she said, even before she had ended the call, ‘get Tiggy on her mobile please and give her the good news, that she can stop chasing those wild geese.’ She checked her watch. ‘Tell her that we’ll pick her up from outside the Courier office in an hour. She’s got that long to find somewhere to grab a bite of lunch. In the meantime, I want family background on Moses Aaron Trott, of eighty-one Arbroath Wynd, Dundee. In particular we need the names and dates of birth of any sons that he and the unfortunate Mrs Trott have produced. Current locations too, although we know already where one of them is.’
Forty-One
Throughout Bob Skinner’s thirties and for a few years beyond, he had harboured an ambition: that when he had reached his sell-by date as a police officer, whenever that might be, and with his daughter Alexis launched securely on a professional career, whatever that might be, he would up stakes and live semi-permanently in the house he had bought with part of his legacy from his father in L’Escala, the only north-facing town on the Catalan Costa Brava.
And then he had met Sarah Grace, and fallen in love. They had married and in his mid-forties he had found himself with a newborn son, and then another daughter. The ambition had become a dream, becoming ever more distant with the birth of each successive child. Dawn’s unexpected arrival had all but snuffed it out. It meant that by the time she was ready to be fledged he would be in his mid-seventies, and beyond such a significant lifestyle change.
Nevertheless, he still loved the house with its hillside view across the Baia de Rosas to the Pyrenean peaks beyond. Before the pandemic, he and Sarah had commissioned an extension, which gave them a new ensuite bedroom, and allowed them to reshape their old accommodation. Lockdown had delayed the project, but as the EQS swung into the driveway, he was pleased to see that it was complete and that the last of the scaffolding had been removed from the site.
‘Thanks, Kiko,’ he said as his cabin bag and his laptop case were retrieved from the boot.
‘De nada, senor,’ the driver replied. ‘When will you need me again?’
‘I don’t think I will. I’ll probably grab a seat on the Gulfstream at the weekend. If I do, I’ll take a taxi from here to the airport.’
As he expected, the house was cold, for all the afternoon sunshine. He fired up the heating system, then made himself a coffee in the Nespresso machine, topping it up with UHT milk that he guessed the builders had left in the fridge. Taking it outside, he sat on the front doorstep and called Sarah on FaceTime.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘L’Escala. Probably until Saturday.’
‘How’s the house looking?’
‘See for yourself.’ He stood, walked around the pool, and turned the camera on his phone.
‘Hey, that’s good,’ she exclaimed. ‘How about inside?’
‘I haven’t looked yet. I’ll shoot some video and send it to you.’
‘I’m jealous. I wish I could join you. Why are you staying so long?
‘There’s something I need to do,’ he replied. He told her about the texts that he and Xavi Aislado had received, and the way in which they had been sent. ‘Not just us,’ he added. ‘Noele McClair had one too.’
She frowned. ‘And you think they came from Matthew Reid? That he faked his death and disappeared?’
‘That’s how it’s looking. And the indications are that he’s in this vicinity. If he is . . . As soon as we finish this chat, and I finish my coffee, I’m on the hunt.’
‘Do you know where his house is? I know it’s near us, but not where.’
‘He told me it’s near Sant Pere Pescador, on the road from there to Torroella de Fluvià. The way he described it, it’s a bit of a barn. He bought it years ago, using his business identity as a tax dodge, I think. He said he was thinking about setting up a film production company and thought he might base it there. He went off the idea, but kept it as a place to work in peace and quiet. If it’s that fucking quiet maybe he thought he could hide out there without being found.’
‘Have you ever mentioned this to Lottie Mann,’ Sarah asked, ‘or to Sauce?’
‘No, I haven’t. To be honest, I’d forgotten about it until these texts started arriving. Why should I do that anyway?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s time the children learned to play outside without the janitor keeping an eye on them.’
‘Ouch!’
Bob laughed. ‘Joking! Joking! I’m not that arrogant, not quite. Look, Lottie’s a good detective. She’s the one with the active inquiry where Matthew’s a person of interest. She’ll have been over his life like she was picking nits out of her kid’s hair. She’ll know about it, I’m sure. But if it’ll keep you happy, I’ll give her a call once I’ve checked it out. How’s your day going?’ he asked. ‘Have they identified our friend from Sunday yet?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Arthur will tell Noele before he tells me. Anyway, today’s news is, he’s got a roommate. More remains were found this morning, close by, so I went up there again. It’s female this time. It was very obvious that she met a violent death.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ he murmured. ‘Is there any link between the two, apart from the obvious, location?’
‘We don’t know yet. If the lab gets a match on one of them it might lead Noele to the other. Maybe the DNA will tell us more than that. We’ve just got to wait and see.’
Forty-Two
‘Detective Inspector McClair?’ The voice was amplified by the car’s speakers: she flicked a small switch on the steering wheel to lower the volume.
‘Yes, who’s this?’
‘My name’s Tina Byrne.’ McClair thought she detected a regional English accent; north-west perhaps. She had always had difficulty telling a Manc from a Scouser. ‘I hear you’re looking for information about Moses Trott. I’m his probation officer; I should be able to help you. What do you need to know?’
‘As much as you can tell us, Ms Byrne. My colleague and I are on the way to his address now, Arbroath Wynd. I’d like to be well briefed when we get there.’
‘You won’t find him at that address,’ the woman said. ‘Moses has dementia. He’s in full-time residential care. I don’t see him much these days, the occasional visit, that’s all. I’m his PO because he’s a lifer, released on licence. Given his condition he can’t come to me, and his accommodation is secure; if I do go, it’s just to say hello really. Nobody else visits him that I know of,’ she added. ‘Moses didn’t exactly go through life making friends, you understand, and his family are all gone.’
‘Does he have a wife? I’m DS Jackie Wright, by the way.’
‘She left him back in the seventies. I established that she moved to Inverness, divorced him and remarried. She and Moses had two offspring, Samuel and Naomi; the family went in for Old Testament forenames. Moses’s father was a Joshua. The children stayed with him when the mother left, God knows why, but they seem to have left the family home a long time ago and don’t keep in touch. They were both respectable, according to a neighbour I interviewed.’
‘A survivor neighbour?’ McClair chuckled grimly.
‘Ah, I see you know how he got his life sentence.’
‘Yes. Something about Metallica.’
‘That’s right. Why are you looking for him anyway, ladies?’ Byrne asked.
‘We think we’ve found Samuel,’ Wright told her. ‘Did you read or hear about remains found on Sunday near Perth?’
‘Yes, a skeleton under a tree?’
‘That’s him. We’ve got a filial DNA link with Moses.’ She paused. ‘How do you think he’ll take it?’
‘I’d be surprised if he understands you,’ Byrne admitted, ‘his dementia being so advanced. One thing’s for sure. You won’t understand him.’
‘Why not?’ McClair asked, puzzled by her underlying laugh.
‘I’ll let you find that out for yourself,’ the probation officer replied.
Forty-Three
Skinner breathed a small, relieved sigh as his car started first time. He and Sarah kept a Skoda Kodiaq in Spain, chosen for its ability to cope with rough roads and for its seven-seat capacity. It had been lying in the garage for over two years, although their agent had ensured that the engine was turned over every few weeks.
It was new enough to have satnav but without an address that was useless. In any case, he was familiar with the towns and villages around L’Escala, and had an idea of the area in which he would be searching. He was conscious of the time constraint. Sunset in Spain was later than in Scotland at that time of year even without the time difference, but he knew that he had less than three hours of daylight left. Rather than take the C31 towards Figueres, he chose the coastal route to Sant Pere Pescador. Skirting St Martí d’ Empúries, but making a mental note to head later for a pizza in L’Esculapi, he crossed the little river and followed the narrow, twisting road. The campsites that would have been teeming with caravans in summer were closed and so there was little or no traffic. It took no more than fifteen minutes for him to pass the oddly named Bon Relax community and reach the outskirts of Sant Pere. There he paused at a roundabout, taking his mental bearings before deciding which exit he should take. Eventually, in the absence of a sign for Torroella de Fluvià, he turned off, heading for La Bisbal. It was guesswork, but he knew instinctively that he was on the right track. ‘Nothing around but apple orchards,’ he recalled Reid saying: the road he was on matched that description. There were no buildings on the left, but on his right he passed a small farmhouse with a tractor outside and two cars, one of them rusting, with a number plate whose style told him, even at a glance, that it had to be at least thirty years old.
