Chapter 10 #3
The wee loon nodded. ‘It’s the fog.’ Pointing at it, as if she couldn’t see the sodding stuff.
‘When you’ve got all this water vapour in suspension it acts as an insulator.
Imagine there’s a smoke alarm going off in your living room, and it’s loud everywhere, right?
So you wrap the detector in a layer of cotton wool.
Only that doesn’t make a lot of difference, so you wrap some more around the thing – and you keep wrapping and wrapping until you can’t hear it anymore.
You might think it’s gone silent, but deep inside the cotton-wool cocoon it’s still deafening.
’ He cupped his hands, then moved them out a little, then a little more, miming concentric circles.
‘The fog’s like that, only with smells. And sound.
And light. Up close: really stinky. Not so far away: everything’s fine.
’ Grin. ‘That’s why I did takes precautions. ’
Course he sodding did.
‘I’ll “precaution” you in a minute.’
‘See?’ He tilted his head back, showing off a pair of yellow blobs – one in each nostril. ‘Got a set of those foam earplugs and rolled them into little cones, then,’ more miming, ‘poink.’
‘You’re disgusting.’
‘Disgusting like a fox!’
Everywhere she looked: idiots.
Puffing hard on the cherry vape, Roberta picked her way around the outside of that plastic coffin – which turned out to be a second wheelie bin, tipped over onto its side, with the lid lying open on the rutted tarmac – staying far enough back to keep breakfast down: two aspirin, two paracetamol, and half a pack of Rennies.
But it was close enough to get a good look at what had spilled out of the fallen bin.
That was definitely a skull, and there were some ribs, and two shoulder blades, a pelvis, lots of vertebrae, and all of the long bones.
Hmm . . . Didn’t seem to be nearly enough phalanges. Ten fingers, ten toes, with three bones each. Should’ve been heaps of them.
Mind you, they could still be in the bin, couldn’t they. Lurking away at the bottom.
The teeth too, because there were none out here. The lower jaw lay separate from the skull, split into three bits, and there wasn’t a single tooth in any of them. None in the rest of the head, either – just cracked bone and empty sockets.
Roberta hunched down and frowned at the stinking mess. ‘You seeing what I’m seeing?’
Tufty squinted. ‘Yes . . .?’
That pair of crows settled on the upright bin, eyes shiny, beaks sharp and ready. Watching.
‘There’s no clothes.’ She pointed at the remains.
‘Even if they were wearing all natural fibres, there’d still be zips, buttons.
Body was stripped: no identifying tags or labels.
Someone’s taken a hammer to the face, so no teeth for forensic dental ID.
Can’t see any fingers – that means no prints.
’ A frown, as she pointed at the crows. ‘Assuming those beaky bastards haven’t nicked them. ’
Tufty shrugged. ‘Yeah, but the body’s a skeleton. There’d be no prints anyway.’
‘Killer couldn’t know it’d take this long to find the remains.’ She stood, brushing the smell from her hands. ‘He’s covering his tracks.’
‘Wow. That’s . . . not good.’ Eyebrows up. ‘Professional hit?’
A faint pwing-twong-pwang rang through the mist, as if someone was tuning-up a vast, strange, musical instrument.
‘Ooh.’ Tufty meerkatted onto his tiptoes. ‘Did you hear that?’
PC Pimples appeared at the cordon, fixing the Airwave handset back on her stabproof’s clip. ‘It’s the railway lines. Must be the Inverness train. Aberdeen one went south about . . . quarter hour ago?’
Oh no . . .
Roberta stared at her. ‘A bloody train?’
The twanging grew louder.
Off in the middle distance, Shirley and Charlie – dressed as ghosts in their SOC suits – struggled under the awkward, lumpy, dead-body-in-a-bag weight of their crime-scene marquee. Hauling it across the lay-by, making for the bins.
‘Sodding . . .’ Roberta waved both arms. ‘GET A BLOODY MOVE ON, THERE’S A TRAIN COMING!’
And just like that, it was on them: thundering out of the fog, all lights blazing, casting spotlights that raked across the lay-by.
The buggers onboard must’ve seen the flickering police lights approaching through the murk, because a whole bunch of them were standing with their phones pressed against the carriage windows, filming.
Probably hoping that something exciting/juicy/horrible was going on so they could record it in HD and share it on their socials.
Rattly-clack, rattly-clack, rattly-clack . . .
Roberta rushed forward, putting herself between the train and the bones, arms out, blocking as much of the scene as possible. ‘DON’T JUST SODDING STAND THERE!’
Rattly-clack, rattly-clack, rattly-clack . . .
Tufty scurried over to help, keeping his head down as he struck a blocking-starfish pose next to her.
Rattly-clack, rattly-clack, rattly-clack . . .
And then the train was past, growl-grumbling away into the fog.
‘Great.’ Roberta slumped, massaging her aching brain again, because God knew how much footage the ghoulish bastards had got. Not to mention the train before them. ‘That’s all we need.’